APPENDIX I

RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM

The title above certainly sounds strange and even facetious; for Russell's attitude to Bergson was not only that of philosophical disagreement, but of positive, almost personal dislike. This dislike accounts for Russell's frequent misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Bergson's thought - the misrepresentations which often border on caricature. It is true that this caricaturing was due more to Russell's inattentive reading than to a conscious desire to ridicule. Russell's own reading of Bergson was accurately characterized by Russell himself when he wrote that "to read an author in order to refute him is not the way to understand him." (OKEW, 47)*). Sometimes, however, the desire to ridicule is clearly discernible; for instance when, ignoring all the distinctions which the author of Creative Evolution draws between instinct and intuition, he confuses them, adding with humor that intuition is strongest "in ants, bees and Bergson." (PB, 3.) In any case, inattentive reading is as much a sign of intellectual indifference or hostility as a distorting caricature. Whether the touch of personal animosity in Russell's attitude was due, as it was submitted, to his suspicion that Bergson "lured" Whitehead away from him, is not certainl , but it would not be too surprising; philosophers are human beings too, Russell more than any other. Although we pointed out a number of times the deep differences separating Bergson's thought from that of Russell, let us briefly recall those which are the most basic. In this way we shall have a contrasting backdrop against which the unintentional agreements between them will appear even more striking. One of Russell's sentences in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) summarizes the contrast between his and Bergson's philosophy in the most concise way: "Both in thought and in feeling, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom." (OKEW, 167). In Mysticism and Logic he repeated the same sentence, but somehow more cautiously: "Both in thought and in feeling, even 336 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

though time be real, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom." (ML 21-22; italics mine). But this note of caution disappears altogether in the sentences which immediatel} follow:

That this is the case may be seen at once by asking ourselves why our feelings toward the past are so different from our feelings toward the future. The reason for this difference is wholly practical: our wishes can affect the future, not the past, the future is to some extent subject to our power, while the past is unalterably fixed. But every future will some day be past: if we see the past truly now, it must, when it was still future, have been just what we now see it to be, and what is now future must be just what we shall see it to be when it has become past. The felt difference of quality between past and future, therefore, is not an intrinsic difference, but only a difference in relation to us; to impartial contemplation, it ceases to exist. And impartiality of contemplation is, in the intellectual sphere, that very same virtue of disinterestedness which, in the sphere of action, appears as justice and unselfishness. Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.

It certainly would be difficult to find in the philosophical literature a passage which would be more anti-Bergsonian in spirit as well as in letter. It is a perfect illustration of the view that "all is given" (tout est donne) - the view which eliminates becoming, transforms the future into a concealed present and wipes out the qualitative differences between the successive phases of time. It is the view of all strict determinists from Democritus to Laplace, and Russell is merely consistent when he says that "it is a mere accident that we have no memory of the future". (OKEW, 234). It eliminates the concept of causation in its original and dynamical sense by substituting for it the relation of logical co-implication in which the future is deducible from the past and vice versa; thus there is not such a thing as "direction of time" or "asymmetry of becoming". In Russell's words: "We shall do better to allow the effect to be before the cause or simultaneous with it, because nothing of any scientific importance depends upon its being after the cause." (OKEW, 226.) This fundamental difference between Russell's and Bergson's views shows itself clearly in their attitude toward Plato and Zeno. While for Bergson, "the intelligible world" of ideas resembles the world of solids in its essential character except that its constitutive elements are "lighter, more diaphanous, easier for the intellect to deal with than the image of concrete things", for Russell in 1912 Plato's doctrine of ideas is one of the most successful attempts to solve the problem of the universals which RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM 337 he accepted with some terminological modifications. He was aware that this view leads to a very sharp kind of dualism:

Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless. The world of universals, therefore, may be also described as the world of being.

It is true that he somehow softens his commitment to Platonism by the following rather sober and remarkably impartial passage:

The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our tempera• ments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other. The one we do not prefer will probably seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthy to be regarded as in any sense real. But the truth is that both have the same claim on our impartial attention, both are real, and both are important to the metaphysician. (P. 100; italics added.)

The passages just quoted show clearly the complexity of Russell's mind as well as the resulting instability of his views. While explicitly admitting his preference for the realm of being, he still conceded then the reality of becoming only to deny - only after two years - the reality of time altogether while at the same time ridiculing Kant for degrading time to a mere appearance. (OKEW, 116-117). But in the passage just quoted another note creeps in - an uneasy awareness that the metaphysical preferences for either being or becoming are perhaps mere personal idiosyncracies, due to individual differences in temperament. A tendency to prefer the metaphysics of Being, together with an underlying note of radical scepticism are two characteristic features of Russell's thought. Comparison of Bergson's and Russell's attitude toward Zeno's para• doxes will show again the basic contrast in their philosophical views, but at the same time will bring out in the most unexpected way certain hidden affinities. Bergson's view of Zeno's paradoxes was consistently held through all his books: the paradoxes arise from the fallacious assumption that motion and time are divisible in infinitum, that is, that the only parts of them which are indivisible are geometrical points and durationless instants. This assumption is based on the confusion of the movement 338 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS itself with its motionless trace in space; it is this motionless trace, not the act of moving (la mobilite, Ie mouvant), which is infinitely divisible. "At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the movement, once effected, has laid along its course a motionless trajectory on which we can count as many immobilities as we will. From this we conclude that the movement, while being effected, lays at each instant beneath it a position with which it coincides. We do not see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although a certain time is required for it; and that though we can divide at will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a thing." 2) Russell's comment on Zeno in his Principles of Mathematics (1903) was significantly different: After two thousand years of continual refutation, these sophisms were reinstated, and made the foundation of a mathematical renaissance, by a German professor, who probably never dreamed of any connection between himself and Zeno. Weierstrass, by strictly banishing infinitesimals, has at last shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow, at every moment of its flight, is truly at rest. The only point where Zeno probably erred was in inferring (if he did infer) that, because there is no change, therefore the world must be in the same state at one time as at another. This conse• quence by no means follows. (PM, 347; italics mine.) In other words, Russell agrees with Zeno that we are living in "an unchanging world"; but against Zeno he claims that the world is not in the same state at every moment. How an unchanging world can be different at different successive moments, he does not explain. The only plausible explanation of what appears to be a glaring contradiction is that by 'change' Russell meant the dynamic passage, the transition, the over• flow of one moment into the subsequent one; he rejected 'change' under• stood in this sense, since it is incompatible with the mutual externality of instants in the mathematically continuous time, and since in mathematical continuum there is no "next" element with respect to the "preceding" one. In any case, it is certain that in 1903 Russell regarded the mathematically continuous space and time as the truly real, as "the world in which we are living", as he says. What we call 'change' was for him nothing but "diver• sity in time", time being unconsciously regarded by him in a mathematical fashion as the axis of independent variables on which "successive" instants with corresponding different states of the world exist or rather coexist. This reconstruction of Russell's thought is the only possible way in which his strange view that "the world is unchanging without being identical in its successive moments" could be made at least psychologically under- RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM 339 standable - without becoming any more convincing. Needless to stress that the adjective 'successive' loses its meaning in Russell's scheme which is a perfect illustration of what Bergson called the "fallacy of spatiali• zation". This came up again eleven years later in a strangely ambiguous passage of Our Knowledge of the External World where Russell wrote: The contention that time is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as based on fallacious reasoning. Was Bergson then right? Not quite; here is the immediately following sentence: Nevertheless, there is some sense - easier to feel than to state - in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowl• edged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from the slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth .... But unimportance is not unreality ... (OKEW, 166-167; italics added.) One must agree with Russell: it is "easier to feel than to state" how time can be real - though unimportant - when past and future are as real as the present. It is ironical to see the thinker who so severely accused Bergson of vagueness, make an appeal to such a diffused feeling and to get entangled in transparent contradictions. But in 1914, when the book just mentioned above was published, Russell's views on Zeno were to some extent modified. While in 1903 he agreed with Zeno that the arrow at every instant of its flight is "truly at rest", in 1914 he disclaims it: "we cannot say it is at rest at the instant, since the instant does not last for a finite time ... Rest consists in being in the same position at all the instants through a certain period, however short. .. " (OKEW, 136). Furthermore, there is another modification of Russell's view: he does not insist any longer that we live in the unchanging world of Zeno. He admits explicitly that "the theory of mathematical continuity is an abstract logical theory, not dependent for its validity upon any properties of actual space and time". But he is clearly aware that the applicability of such continuous series to the world of experience is another matter. He concedes that "interpenetration", that is, the "transition which is not a matter of discrete units" is a datum of immediate experience, but he attempts to escape this uncomfortable fact by differ• entiating fictitiously "appearance" from "reality". Such distinction is clearly meaningless on the level of immediate experience where - as 340 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

Russell himself conceded at another place of the same book (72, 85-86) appearance and reality coincide. But whil~nsisting that the world of senses may be continuous, he concedes that there is no sufficient reason for it either. In other words, while the theory of mathematically continuous series is compatible with experience, it is not necessitated by it.

From what has just been said it follows that the nature of sense data cannot be validly used to prove that they are not composed of mutually external units. It may be admitted, on the other hand, that nothing in their empirical character specially necessi• tates the view that they are composed of mutually external units. This view, if it is held, must be held on logical, not on empirical grounds. I believe that the logical grounds are adequate to the conclusion. They rest, at bottom, upon the impossibility of ex• plaining complexity without assuming constituents. (OKEW, 145). In other words: Russell's logical atomism still makes him lean toward ac• cepting the infinite divisibility of space and time and the actual existence of points and instants, even though he is aware that they are unverifiable empirically. While he was then closer to Bergson in admitting the con• ceptual constructive nature of "instants", his insistence that every multi• plicity must be of the atomistic type, built of the mutually external units, ignores completely the qualitative multiplicity which constitutes immediate experience. It was one year later, in two articles which appeared in The Monist, that Russell - without realizing it - came closest to Bergson's thought. In the article 'On the Experience of Time' he explicitly gave up the reality of the durationless mathematical present in psychology:

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that I look steadily at a motionless object while I hear a succession of sounds. The sounds A and B, though successive, may be experienced together, and therefore my seeing of the object while I hear these sounds need not be supposed to constitute two direct experiences. But the same applies to what I see while I hear the sounds Band C. Thus the experience of seeing the given object will be the same at the time of the sound A and at the time of the sound C, although these two times may well not be parts of one specious present. Thus our definition will show that the hearing of A and the hearing of C form parts of one experience, which is plainly contrary to what we mean by one experience. Suppose, to escape this conclusion, we say that my seeing the object is a different experience while I am hearing A from what it is while I am hearing B. Then we shall be forced to deny that the hearing of A and the hearing of B form parts of one experience. In that case, the perception of change will become inexplicable, and we shall be driven to greater and greater subdivision, owing to the fact that changes are constantly occurring. We shall thus be forced to conclude that one experience cannot last for more than one mathematical instant, which is absurd. (ET, 216-217); italics mine.) RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM 341

This is the very opposite of the view held by Russell only a year before when he claimed that "it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the sense data of a given type ... really form a compact series". The passage above could well have been written by Bergson himself; in truth, it is not difficult to find similar passages in Bergson's works. It is not only the concept of durationless instant which Russell here rejects; he concedes also, however reluctantly, the inapplicability of the concept of arithmetic multiplicity to sensory and introspective experience. It is true that he tries valiantly to define "one momentary total experience", as well as the "specious present"; but as it is clear from the text above, he arrives at the conclusion that the relation "belonging to the present" is not transitive and "that two presents may overlap without coinciding". But what else is this than Bergson's "penetration mutuelle", i.e. "qualitative multiplicity"? (ET, 223, 214). No less Bergsonian, but equally consistent was Russell's acceptance of the direct perception of succession and change, in other words, of "immediate memory". Thus he says that "succession may be directly experienced between parts of one sense datum, for example, in the case of a swift movement" which is the object of one sensation. (227) "It is indubitable that we have knowledge of the past, and it would seem, though this is not logically demonstrable, that such knowledge arises from ac• quaintance with past objects in a way enabling us to know that they are past." (222) He admits that we know the past by acquaintance, that is, directly; like Bergson, he claims that "immediate memory is intrinsically distinguishable from sensation" (226) and therefore should not be con• fused with the present trace of the past sensation:

There is first what may be called "physiological" memory, which is simply the per• sistance of a sensation for a short time after the stimulus is removed ... This fact is irrelevant to us, since it has nothing to do with anything discoverable by introspection alone. Throughout the period of "physiological memory", the sense datum is actually present ... We will give the name of "immediate memory" to the relation which we have to an object which has recently been a sense datum, but is now felt as past, though still given in acquaintance. (224-225; last italics added). He also fully realizes that the direct knowledge of the past presupposes the Bergsonian immanence of the past within the present: At first sight, we should naturally say that what is past cannot also be present; but this would be to assume that no particular can exist at two different times, or endure throughout a finite period of time. It would be a mistake to make such an assumption, 342 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS and therefore we shall not say that what is past cannot also be present... The present has no sharp boundaries, and no constituent of it can be picked out as certainly the earliest. (222-223; italics mine).

All these passages have their nearly exact counterparts in Bergson's writings and they have been quoted in this book. It is true that Russell's language is still static, atomistic and spatializing in its characteristics; the terms like 'object', 'constituent', 'part of an object' show it clearly. Thus instead of speaking of "duration", he speaks of "one particular existing at two times". But the substance of his view is the same. The fact that Bergson is hardly quoted in this article should not deceive us; Russell refers to William James's analysis of the perception of time (225) and we do not need to repeat how close James's "stream of thought" was to the Bergsonian duree reel/e. In the second essay, 'The Ultimate Constituents of Matter' (reprinted in M.L.), Russell gave up the applicability of the concept of durationless instant even to physics. He attacks the assumption that the ultimate constituents of matter must be permanent and indestructible; the allegedly permanent "thing" is a logical construct based on the perceptual illusion of fusing together the successive series of momentary states:

Each of these [i.e. of tables, chairs, the sun, moon, stars] is to be regarded, not as one single persistent entity, but as a series of entities succeeding each other in time, each lasting for a very brief period, though probably not for a mere mathematical instant .... A true theory of matter requires a division of things into time-corpuscles as well as into space-corpuscles. (M. L., 129).

Russell thus constructs the world out of momentary particulars which, he insists, "are to be conceived, not on the analogy of bricks in a building, but rather on the analogy of notes in a symphony. The ultimate constitu• ents of a symphony (apart from relations) are the notes, each of which lasts only for a very short time. We may collect together all the notes played by one instrument: these may be regarded as the analogues of the successive particulars which common sense regard as successive states of one 'thing'" (M.L. 129-130). It is the same auditory model as that used by Bergson and Whitehead. This attack on the basic assumptions of classical atomism and the tendency to reduce physical existence to the succession of events is obviously similar to Bergson's and Whitehead's "vibratory theory of matter" whose consonance with the philosophical RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM 343 implications of the quantum theory we stressed before. Russell took it over again in his Analysis of Matter where he spoke about the atomicity of space-time and "the quantized geodesic routes between two events". (A.Ma., 304, 341). A close analysis of Russell's view will show the limits of its affinity with the views of both Bergson and Whitehead. This can be stated in one single sentence: Russell gave up physical, not logical atomism. Russell's idea of corpuscular time may appropriately be characterized as an atomistic translation of the pulsational time of James and Bergson; Russell's "corpuscles of time" are apparently externally related. It is true that this view was not consistent with Russell's view upheld nearly at the same time that the present does not have sharp boundaries. But he apparently overlooked it. Otherwise he would not have characterized his view of the universe as "cinematographic". He recalls that his first visit to a cinema was motivated by his desire to verify Bergson's statement that the mathematician conceived the world after the analogy of a cine• matograph, and he found it "completely true" (M.L. 128). There was, however, a significant difference between both philosophers. For Bergson the successive projection of the static picture on the screens symbolizes "the cinematographic mechanism of thought" which tries to reconstruct change out of changeless entities; for Russell, it is a correct and adequate analysis of the physical processes. For Bergson the experienced continuity of change, succession and motion is real, the successive static "moments" are illusory; for Russell the very opposite is true, "the cinema is a better metaphysician than common sense, physics or philosophy". (M.L. 129) Bergson would agree with Russell that the persistence of the physical objects is an illusion since Bergson's matter is also constituted by the momentary (though not instantaneous) events. Another basic difference is that Russell's "atoms of time" apparently have the same, no matter how minute, duration; the idea of variable temporal span, which is the cornerstone of Bergson's metaphysics, is altogether absent from his thought. This explains his view that he - again unlike Bergson - does not recognize the genuine continuity of psychologi• cal duration:

The real man too, I believe, however the police may swear to his identity, is really a series of momentary men, each different one from the other, and bound together, not by a numerical identity, but by continuity and certain intrinsic causal laws. eM. L. 129) 344 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

This is nearly altogether a Humean view; I say 'nearly', since in the Humean framework, there is no place for 'intrinsic causal laws' at all. In the subsequent development of Russell's thought, his 'logical atomism' came to the fore far more clearly. In The Analysis of Mind he upheld the associationism of Hume with hardly any improvement. Memory is reduced by him to the occurrence of a present image accom• panied by the belief in past existence: "this existed". He insists on the absolute externality of the present remembering and the event remem• bered; for this reason he condemns "Bergson's interpenetration of the present by the past, Hegelian continuity and identity-in-diversity, and a host of other notions which are thought to be profound because they are obscure and confused" (A.Mi. 180), apparently forgetting all the subtle analyses of his essay 'On Our Experience of Time'. His amnesia on this point continues in The Analysis of Matter (1927): "For my part, I do not think logical interpenetration can be defined without obvious self• contradiction; Bergson, who advocates it, does not define it." (A.Ma. 387) In his Human Knowledge he does not stop short of the most extreme form of "the fallacy of simple location in time", as Whitehead would call it, when he claimed that not only is a man private from other people, but he is also private from his own past. It is not "here" alone that is private, but also "now". (HK. 90) Obviously, if there is such complete externality of the past with respect to the present, the supposition that the world might have come into existence a few moments ago with all things as they are now, including my fallacious recollections, is not absurd and is, strictly speaking, irrefutable. (HK. 212) Russell, however, concedes that nobody takes such supposition seriously. But if it is so, if nobody takes seriously what cannot 'logically' be refuted, then there must be something radically wrong with a logic of this kind. It is precisely, such atomistic logic, - an inadequate conceptual tool for dealing with the dynamic and elusive structure of time - which prevented Russell from agreeing with Bergson. For this reason his "incipient Bergsonism" of the year 1915 remained so well hidden - to him as well as to his commentators. NOTES

* The references and the abbreviations refer to the following of Russell's books: The Principles of Mathematics (PM), W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1964. The Problems ofPhilosophy (PP), Galaxy Book, Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1959. RUSSELL'S HIDDEN BERGSONISM 345

The Philosophy of Bergson (PB), Macmillan, London, 1914; originally in The Monist 22 (1912). Our Knowledge of the External World (OKEW), Allen & Unwin, London, 1914. 'On the Experience of Time' (ET), The Monist, 1915. Mysticism and Logic (ML), W. W. Norton, New York, 1929. The Analysis of Mind (AMi), Allen & Unwin, London, 1921. The Analysis of Matter (AMa), Dover, New York, 1954. Human Knowledge (HK), Simon & Schuster, New York, 1962. 1 Cf. H. C. McElroy, Modern Philosophers: Western Thought since Kant, Russell F. Moore Co., New York, 1950, p. 141. Bergson referred to Russell's attack in his conver• sation with Jacques Chevalier on May 30, 1933 when he expressed a different theory about the origin of Russell's animosity toward him: "Bertrand Russell has never for• given me the refutation which I made once of his too material interpretation of the Platonic Ideas. He revenged himself by saying that the evolution culminated on one side in the intellect which found its complete development in mathematicians, and on the other side, in instinct which is at best in ants, bees and Bergson." (J. Chevalier, Entretiens avec Bergson, Paris, 1959, p. 197.) Bergson's mildly ironic quotation of Russell clearly referred to the discussion which took place in the Aristotelian Society, 1911, and to which Russell refers in My Philosophical Development, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1959, p. 161. The unfairness of Russell's attack was recognized by Alan Wood in his book Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1958, pp. 197-198, where he pointed out that while Russell criticized Bergson for the confusion of subject and object, in the next chapter he praised William James for denying the same distinction! 2 C.E., p. 336. APPENDIX II

MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM, BERGSON AND PEIRCE

Many of man's technical discoveries have been anticipated - sometimes with truly astonishing precision - by various organisms, animal as well as vegetable. L. Cuenot's book, Invention et finalite en biologie surveys facts of this kind in a systematic way'! These facts are not unknown to biologists, - and even to some philosophers who, however, under the impact of the magic formula of 'natural selection' have lost the capacity for wonder which Aristotle correctly identified as the main source of philosophical meditation. The twentieth century man invented extremely complex and ingenious mechanisms by which the effect of microphysical events can be amplified to produce a sizeable macroscopic effect. We thus face the following fascinating question: Has not organic nature also anticipated this human achievement? More specifically: Is not the very structure of the organism an embodiment of such an amplifying device? This, indeed, is the view of Niels Bohr in his 1957 lecture 'Physical Science and the Problem of Life'. When he then remarked that "amplifi• cation effects similar to those permitting observation of individual atomic particles playa decisive role in many functions of the organism", he stated more explicitly what he had said nearly three decades before in the 1929 lecture which was later incorporated into his book Atomtheorie und Naturbeschreibung. He then very cautiously concluded that while there is no basic difference between organic and inorganic matter, a deeper understanding of biological problems, in particular of the freedom and capacity of adjustment ("die Freiheit und Anpassungsvermogen") of organisms in their reactions to external stimuli, requires taking into account the limits of causal description in atomic processes. 2 Bohr's ideas stimulated another outstanding physicist, Pascual Jordan, to outline more explicitly in a series of articles in Naturwissenschaften and Erkenntnis the theory that organisms are the amplifiers of microphysical indetermination. 3 More recently, another physicist, Walter Elsasser, formulated a similar MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 347 theory in the light of new neurological data and related it explicitly to Bergson's views. 4 There is unquestionably a certain similarity between Jordan's, Elsasser's and Bergson's views, even though - as we shall see later - this similarity has definite limits. One of the central ideas of Creative Evolution is precisely that the organism, in particular the nervous system, is an amplifying device by which "the slightest quantity of indetermination, by continually adding to itself, will make as much freedom as possible". This was how Bergson summarized its leading ideas four years after the publication of Creative Evolution in his Huxley lecture at the University of Birmingham on May 29, 1911.5 When we investigate the way in which a living body goes to work to execute movements, we find that the method it employs is always the same. This consists in utilizing certain unstable substances which, like gunpowder, need only a spark to explode them. I refer to foodstuffs, especially to ternary substances, carbo-hydrates and fats. A considerable sum of potential energy, accumulated in them, is ready to be converted into movement. That energy has been slowly and gradually borrowed from the sun by plants; and the animal which feeds on a plant, or on an animal which has been fed on a plant, or on an animal which has fed on an animal which has been fed on a plant, and so on, simply receives into its body an explosive which life has fabricated by storing solar energy. To execute a movement, the imprisoned energy is liberated. All that is required is, as it were, to press a button, touch a hair trigger, apply a spark: the explosion occurs, and the movement in the chosen direction is accomplished.6 Hence the significance of very complex and unstable organic molecules containing a great amount of potential energy which can be released by a quantitatively minute stimulus. As the complexity of the organic body is increased, the effect of the triggering action would be greater as the quantity of the bound energy will be correspondingly larger. In this way - in the words of Creative Evolution - there will be introduced into the physical world "the largest possible amount of indetermination" and liberty 7, or, in Elsasser's words, "the main function of the organism is the creation of a new physical reality".8 Life is thus characterized as "an effort to engraft on to the necessity of physical forces the largest amount of indetermination" : This effort cannot result in the creation of energy, or, if it does, the quantity created does not belong to the order of magnitude apprehended by our senses and instruments of measurement, our experience and science. All that the effort can do, then, is to make the best of a pre-existing energy which it finds at its disposal. Now, it finds only one way of succeeding in this, namely to secure such an accumulation of potential energy from matter, that it can get, at any moment, the amount of work needed for its action, 348 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS simply by pulling a trigger. The effort itself possesses only that power of releasing. But the work of releasing, although always the same and always smaller than any given quantity, will be the more effective the heavier the weight it makes fall and the greater the height - or, in other words, the greater the sum of potential energy accumulated and disposable. As a matter of fact, the principal source of energy usable on the surface of our planet is the sun. So the problem was this: to obtain from the sun that it should provisionally and partially suspend, here and there, on the surface of the earth, its continual outpour of usable energy, and store a certain quantity of it in the form of unused energy, in appropriate reservoirs, whence it could be drawn at the desired moment, at the desired spot, in the desired direction. The substances forming the food of animals are just such reservoirs. Made of very complex molecules holding a con• siderable amount of chemical energy in the potential state, they are like explosives which only need a spark to set free the energy stored within them. (Italics mine.) 9 Two central ideas of Creative Evolution are present in this passage: first, that life seems to operate in a direction opposed to the second law of thermodynamics by creating structures more and more complex and more and more improbable and thus suspending, at least temporarily and locally, a continuous dissipation of energy; second, that these complex organic structures are the means by which the microphysical indeter• minacy is transmitted and amplified to become macrophysically effective. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the first point, since it would involve us inevitably in a very extensive critical comment on Creative Evolution itself. The discussion of the second point will show that the similarity of Bergson's view to that of Jordan and Elsasser has definite limits. On the higher animal level the established mechanisms by which the microphysical indeterminacy is amplified to become macrophysically effective are represented by the neural mechanisms lodged in the cerebro• spinal system. The body carries out voluntary movements by means of certain mechanisms set up in the nervous system and waiting only for the signal to start them; the brain is the point where the signal is given and also where the mechanism is operated. The Rollandic zone, where voluntary movement has been localized, is in fact comparable to a signal-box, from which the signalman shunts the coming train to its proper line. It is a sort of commutator, by which a given external stimulus can be put in communication with any motor disposition whatever,lo Or, in a wider phylogenetic perspective: From the humblest Monera to the best-endowed insects, and up to the most intelligent vertebrates, the progress realized has been above all a progress of the nervous system, coupled at every stage with all the new constructions and complications of mechanism that this progress required. As we foreshadowed in the beginning of this work, the role MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 349 of life is to insert some indetermination into matter. Indeterminate, i.e. unforeseeable, are the forms it creates in the course of its evolution. More and more indeterminate also, more and more free, is the activity to which these forms serve as the vehicle. A nervous system, with neurons placed end to end in such wise that, at the extremity of each, manifold ways open in which manifold questions present themselves, is a veritable reservoir of indetermination. 11 The idea that an enormous amount of energy can be released by a tiny, almost infinitesimal quantity was not foreign to classical physics. The well known facts of explosion, of unstable equilibrium and of any triggering mechanism certainly belong within the purview of classical physics. Herbert Spencer had his own labels for facts of this kind: "the unstability of the homogeneous" and "multiplications of effects". Nor was it unknown that such phenomena are conspicuous in the organic realm where, as Schopenhauer observed, "effect is often not quantitatively equal to its cause". Needless to say that such phenomena contradict neither the law of conservation of energy nor the general idea of classical determinism. The amount of energy, no matter how spectacularly large, is not created ex nihilo, since it pre-existed in a potential form. Nor is the triggering agency, no matter how negligible, an undetermined event, comparable to the Lucretian clinamen. It is a definite physical occurrence with definite physical antecedents - at least as long as we remain on the ground of classical physics. From this point of view, the central impulse which steers the neural energy of the afferent stimulus into certain motor paths, no matter how small it remains and no matter how much it escapes our measurements, still remains a definite physical event which must have definite physical causes and thus be an inevitable outcome of the immedi• ately preceding enormously complex state of the brain. The hair-trigger organization of the mammalian brain was well known to the last century's cerebral physiology, which, nevertheless, would not have called the ner• vous system "a reservoir of indetermination" except in a purely figurative sense. Thus when William James suggested that the central activating impulse may be actually co-determined by a feeling of effort12, it was possible to refute him in the name of classical determinism, which confined con• sciousness within the limbo of causal inefficacy. James himself was well aware of this difficulty, which stemmed from the fact that the only solution of the traditional mind-body problem compatible with classical physics was the double-aspect theory - called the theory of psychophysical 350 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS parallelism on the continent - according to which mental events are merely passive epiphenomena or 'inner aspects' - of the rigorously deter• mined neural processes. As Nietzsche said: "The will does not move anything; it does not explain anything; - it only accompanies the processes; it may be even absent." 13 Or in the words of another physiologi• cally oriented psychologist of the fin de siec/e: We should not forget, however, that action is not produced because a concomitant psychical process is introduced. By no means. On the contrary, the material process which lies at the foundation of the action is completely in itself... the parallel psychical processes are useless and superfluous.l4 Since these were the authoritative views of James' contemporaries, it is understandable that he himself conceded that "the feeling of effort may be an inert accompaniment and not the active element which it seems".15 His option for indeterminism at that time was based almost exclusively on ethical grounds and certainly was altogether incompatible with the Laplacean universe in which genuine choice, contingency and freedom was nothing but a mere "asylum ignorantiae", a refuge of ignorance of all determining causes. But to claim that the intellectual situation is the same today is nothing but a sheer dogmatism which is completely blind to all the profound and revolutionary changes which have occurred in physics in the last seventy years, and which, in particular, completely ignores the widening of the concept of causation which modern physics suggests. Today the classical concept of causality is being given up, or, more accurately, being replaced by a redefined concept purged of the inconsistencies and absurdities of the old Laplacean type. As we tried to point out, the widened concept of causation, advocated by Bergson before Whitehead, Reichenbach, Heisenberg, Bondi and Whitrow, affirms the reality of a genuinely growing world in which authentic novelties emerge - not from nothing, but from the past antecedents. In such a world, the genuine efficacy of will ceases to be irrational since it is only a special instance of novelty. As Peirce prophetically observed a quarter of a century before Heisenberg: On the other hand, by supposing the rigid necessity of causation to yield, I care not how little - be it by a strictly infinitesimal amount - we gain room to insert mind into our scheme, and to put it into the place where it is needed, into the position which, as the sole self-intelligible thing, it is entitled to occupy, that of the fountain of existence; and in doing so we resolve the problem of connection of soul and body.16 MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 351

But this is more easily said than done. Peirce was undoubtedly right when he said that the physical universe, if compatible with a certain degree of indetermination, - no matter how small - ceases to be imper• vious to the causal efficacy of mind which remained a sheer irrationality in the universe of classical physics. It is well known that Descartes failed to reconcile psychophysical interaction with the rigorous determinism of his mechanistic universe. It is less well known that three centuries later Hans Driesch failed in a similar hopeless enterprise - to reconcile the action of his non-physical 'entelechy' with the determinism of Newtonian physics, to which he remained loyal through his whole life.17 The present physics, anticipated in this respect by both Peirce and Bergson, removed two stumbling blocks which both Descartes and Driesch - as well as any dualist - faced: Laplacean determinism and the complete heterogeneity of the mental and the physical. As long as physical determinism remained complete and as long as the two realms - that of 'mind' and that of 'matter' - remained completely heterogeneous - any interaction between them remained both impossible and unintelligible. But within the pan• psychistic perspective, which is so conspicuous in the passage from Peirce quoted above and which is so akin to the panpsychism of Bergson and Whitehead, there is no place for the sharp Cartesian dualism. To conclude from this that the problem of the connection between the mental and the physical is 'solved' as Peirce did, is a bit premature. Some serious difficulties still remain of which Peirce was apparently unaware, but which became quite conspicuous considerably later, when Pascual Jordan - without knowing it - was trying to realize what may be called 'Peirce's program': a new formulation of the psychophysical problem within the framework of the contingentist physics. Jordan's theory of organisms as "amplifiers of microphysical indetermi• nation" stirred a lively discussion among the members of the Vienna circle. Moritz Schlick, Philipp Frank, Hans Reichenbach, Erwin Biinning, Edgar Zilsel, Otto Neurath and Hans Winterstein took part in iUs Their reaction was - with exception of Reichenbach - negative and even hostile; but the nature of the arguments and the tone of their polemic varied greatly from one person to another. Roughly speaking the objections fell into two different groups: those which were clearly irrelevant since they questioned and suspected the motives of Jordan's views instead of dealing with the views themselves; and those which critically analyzed Jordan's 352 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS views. It would be unwise to deal extensively with objections of the first kind; all psychologizing and 'psychoanalyzing' of an opponent in dis• cussion is, besides its irrelevancy, also a double-edged weapon which can be easily turned against those who use it. If Jordan was accused of doing an inveterate "metaphysics", (veraltete Metaphysik in Neurath's words), of being "prejudiced" in favor of the autonomy of life, of emotionally welcoming the alleged reconciliation of physics and freedom, he could have easily riposted by psychoanalyzing the unconscious or semi• conscious attitudes of his opponents which showed themselves in the very language they used. It would be interesting to raise the question to what extent the psychological atmosphere of the imperial city of Vienna and of the old Habsburg Austro-Hungarian monarchy in general left lasting traumatic effects on the majority of members of the Wiener Kreis. The alliance of the reactionary dynastic regime with the hardly less reactionary church, with the resulting tight control of education, the morbid anti-semitism bordering on active persecution, and systematic suspicion of all anti-traditional ideas almost certainly contributed to this effect. It was in such an unhealthy atmosphere that the majority of the members grew up; it is then hardly surprising that words like 'meta• physics', 'freedom', and 'mind' aroused their suspicion and anger, that their very usage was regarded by them as an attempt to smuggle dis• credited supernaturalism back into philosophical discussions. Instead of this, Jordan merely pointed out that the basic question was not the "emotional motives" of his views, but whether or not his views were correct. Hans Reichenbach also resolutely rejected any labelling of Jordan's views as "metaphysical" - metaphysical in the Viennese sense as confused, irresponsible speculations - and stated with admirable intellectual honesty and open-mindedness:

As philosophers, we must in principle admit the possibility that Jordan is right... And we must stress this possibility precisely against such biologists who are too easily inclined to reject any such suggestions from a physicist and to cling to the apriorist view of causality ... Nothing is as dangerous as dogmatism; but, unfortunately, among many of them the dogmatic view still prevails that the quantum mechanical view of causality cannot affect in any way the concept of causality in biology.19

Far more worthy of attention are the objections which dealt with the content of Jordan's views. Among those, the critical analyses by Bunning and Schlick are most penetrating. Bunning tried to show that even the MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 353 tiniest organisms are still macrophysical systems; even the monocellular organisms still have a diameter of several microns. The centrosome, with the diameter of a fraction of a micron, still consists of several thousands of huge molecules; and it is well known that such organic molecules consist of a large number of atoms. Even Bunning was aware that the zone of microphysical indeterminacy interacts with the realm of middle dimensions. He mentioned that no more than two alpha-particles can kill bacillus prodigiosus; that the gene consists of one giant molecule and that the question of whether change of the gene itself, i.e., mutation, is a strictly determined process must be left open. No wonder that Jordan in his rejoinder claimed that this part of Bunning's criticism strengthened rather than weakened his theory of organisms as amplifiers of micro• physical contingency. Reichenbach himself regarded similar objections made by Zilsel as inconclusive. 2o More serious was Bunning's objection that any amplification of micro• physical contingency within an organism would seriously disturb its functioning and would thus lead to disease or even death. Moritz Schlick's penetrating analysis of Jordan's views was along the same lines. It argues that amplification of the microphysical chance-events - besides its enor• mous improbability - would result in a greater degree of contingency (Zufall) which is the very opposite of freedom. He points out that Jordan himself was aware that mere indetermination leaves the stability of organisms unexplained. 21 These serious objections are far from fatal, though Jordan was unable to answer them. But he could have pointed out that the amplification process takes place by means of well established mechanisms whose functioning is adjusted to the normal functioning of the whole body and thus does not produce any destructive effect, as Bunning feared. This was, as we have seen, essentially the view of Bergson: that various ready-made motor mechanisms in the body can be triggered by an insignificant amount of energy which itself is of the order in which microphysical indeterminacy plays a role. Voluntary movements, despite their explosive character, do not threaten the well-being of organisms since the energy thus released is channeled by the established paths to the periphery of the body and to its surrounding. But while this answers Bunning's objection concerning the allegedly destructive effect of amplification, it does not answer Schlick's question 354 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS as to why the amplified microphysical contingency terminates almost always in an overt action tending to assure the survival of organism; in other words, why the resulting motor response generally has a teleologi• cal character. For if we concede that in an adult organism various ready• made motor responses, acquired by previous learning, are, so to speak, waiting to be triggered by an appropriate stimulus, the influence of a contingent factor in the critical area of the brain would bring about utter anarchy in the motor responses to various situations. The sight of approaching danger would with equal probability activate the reflex of running away from it as that of moving towards it. The objection becomes even more serious if we realize that in view of the 'hair-trigger organi• zation of the brain', a teleological reaction would be a 'hit-or-miss' affair against which the odds would be overwhelmingly large. From a purely statistical point of view a correlation of the appropriate response with a given stimulus would be incomparably less probable than out-of-place or even a disastrous reaction. It would possess the extreme improbability of one single lucky hit contrasting with the enormous number, and conse• quently enormously greater probability, of all other possible unsuited combinations. This was pointed out by William James in his Principles ofPsychology a long time ago, and although his objection was formulated against classical mechanism, it retains its full force against what David Bohm appropriately called 'indeterministic mechanism' as well. Whether we understand the term 'fortuituous' in the sense of the classical theory of gases, compatible with the Laplacean determinism, or in the modern quantum-mechanical sense, the difficulty remains. Thus Moritz Schlick and Philipp Frank were basically right when they pointed out that in Jordan's view man still would be "a purely physical system", amplifying a fortuitous microphysical indetermination; i.e. basically nothing but "l'homme-machine"22, only, unlike the man-machine of Lamettrie, in• trinsically unpredictable. In other words, neither vitalism nor any kind of interactionism gained anything by Jordan's theory. To this Jordan retorted that it was not his intention "to save vitalism" as Edgar Zilsel charged; he insisted that from his point of view "autonomy oflife" does not have any sense 23 since, contrary to the traditional dualistic vitalism, physical contingency is not confined to the organic realm, but is omnipresent in nature. But his view was not as unambiguous as he claimed; for other utterances of his clearly suggest that he did not regard MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 355 the microphysical contingency within organisms on a par with the for• tuitous quantum-mechanical fluctuations. Otherwise why did he put so much stress on a close connection between such indetermination and the teleology of organisms? And - even more important - why did he stress the significance of our feeling offreedom, of our consciousness of choice, which he regarded as far more significant than the inveterate doctrines (veralteten Doctrinen) of classical determinism?24 The only intelligible interpretation of his view which, while not explicitly present in his writings, is implied in them, is that he was proposing a modified version of the classical double-aspect theory. This theory regarded the awareness of choice which precedes the fiat of our will as an altogether illusory feeling, since in the classical scheme there are no such things as genuine possibilities, genuine alternatives; only one decision is possible from eternity and only one overt reaction at any given moment can take place. In Spinoza's graphical illustration, our feeling of freedom is as illusory as that which a falling stone would have, were it conscious; it, too, would probably regard its predetermined fall as a result of its own 'free will'. Or in the more recent words of Theodule Ribot, the feeling of effort, the experience of activity, is only "a subjective state corresponding to certain operations going on in the nerve centers and other parts of the organism, but resembling them as little as the sensations of sound and light resemble their objective cause".25 It is as deceptive, as 'epiphe• nomenal' and, consequently, as causally inert as other conscious qualities; since it merely accompanies the incipient, but completely predetermined motor discharge that terminates in an overt reaction. Jordan apparently modified the classical version in one important aspect; the feeling of choice, according to him, is not illusory, since in the world of quantum physics there are genuine possibilities, truly open alternatives. This can mean only one thing - that psychological feeling of choice, of voluntary fiat, is an inner, subjective aspect of a microphysical indetermination occurring in a certain area of our brain and then amplified to an overt reaction. Briefly: while Jordan gave up the rigorous determinism of the classical double-aspect theory, he retained its basic claim about one-to• one correspondence of the physical and the mental. It may be objected that thus formulated Jordan's theory makes an extremely improbable assumption. Since all the options of organisms are triggered by a statistically undetermined event, all teleological reactions 356 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS are hit-and-miss affairs in the sense explained above. Jordan clearly does not explain why the initiating micro-event has - if not always, at least most frequently - the character of a spark thrown into an explosive material "at the desired moment, at the desired spot, in the desired direction" - to use Bergson's words. The improbability of such a solution was felt by Eddington when he wrote, not without humour:

I do not think that our decisions are precisely balanced on the conduct of certain key-atoms. Could we pick out one atom in Einstein's brain and say that if it had made the wrong quantum jump there would have been a corresponding flaw in the theory of relativity? Having regard to the physical influences and promiscuous collisions it is impossible to maintain thiS.26 Jordan apparently believed that not only the individual reaction of the organism, but the whole of phylogenetic evolution depends on the statistical improbabilities taking place within the key-atoms; hence, his emphasis on the microphysical character of mutations, mentioned above. But let us be fair to him. His idea that the evolution of all complex organic forms is a result of the cumulation of improbable microphysical events may appear grotesque; but is it really so different from the orthodox neo• Darwinian version of the evolutionary theory? For the latter claims that the development of the species resulted from fortuituous variations which were then sifted by natural selection. The only difference is that 'foro, tuituous' is understood by the neo-Darwinians in the classical sense compatible with Newtonian determinism while Jordan understands this term in the objectivist sense of Peirce's tychism or Boutroux's con• tingentism. It is rather amusing to see the mechanists of the Vienna circle accuse Jordan of failing to explain the teleology of the organism. They themselves proposed an equally non-teleological explanation. But there is another decisive objection against Jordan's theory, even though it is less obvious. His key idea seems to be the claim that there is a one-to-one correlation between the introspective fiat of our will and a single microphysical event. A brief analysis will show the impossibility of this view. It is well known and was stressed repeatedly in this book that mental events or qualities have a certain existential temporal minimum and that they simply vanish when their temporal span is lowered below this minimum. We expressed this by saying that the mnenic span in the psychological realm is considerably larger than that of the physical events. It is unnecessary to repeat what was discussed before. Suffice it MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 357 to say that the minimum psychological duration is of the order of 10-2 sec and as such it is enormously longer than the temporal minimum in the physical world. Even if we concede the non-existence of mathematical instants or zero-intervals, the estimated value of the chronon is of the order of 10-24 sec, i.e. 1022 shorter than the faintest pulsation of our conscious life. It is clear that no one-to-one correlation can exist between events of such an enormously different temporal span. * The only way to save the one-to-one correlation between the physical and the mental would be to postulate that the conscious temporal Ge• stalten are only apparently simple and indivisible and that they, in reality, consist of an enormously large number of successive sub-sensations of a duration comparable to the duration of the corresponding physical events. But this claim was extensively discussed and dismissed in Part II, and it would be otiose to refute it again. The one-to-one correlation between the physical and the mental cannot be saved in an epistemologically tenable way without doing violence to the most obvious data of experience. The temporal indivisibility of the mental qualia is certainly such a datum. To dissect them artificaIIy into some fictitious 'petites perceptions' is clearly a heritage of the outdated associationistic 'mind-dust theory'. In the same way the related belief that the physical, i.e. instantaneous, present is the only authentic present, while the psychological present is merely 'specious', is a hangover of the nineteenth century physicalism and epiphenomenalism. We must then agree with Zilsel that Jordan's attempt to "save vitalism" - if this is what he intended to do - failed for the reasons stated above; but we must add that if it failed, it was because it contained the classical physicalistic elements which made its failure inevitable. Since no such physicalistic elements are present in Bergson's thought, the similarity between Jordan's and Elsasser's views and those of Bergson is restricted to the two points, already mentioned: the belief in microphysical indeter• minism, anticipated by Bergson as early as 1896, and the view of organisms as the amplifiers of physical micro-indetermination. Both Jordan, Elsasser and, still more recently, John R. Platt 28 approached the problem of freedom from almost an exclusively physical and physiological stand-

* This is what Edgar Zilsel saw clearly when he pointed out that, were Jordan's views correct, our stream of consciousness (Bewustseinsablauf) would go on at much quicker rate - I would add with fantastically much quicker rate.27 358 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS point. Yet, without a complementary introspective analysis of voluntary fiat as it was done in such classical studies as those of William James, Narciss Ach and Bergson himself, every attempted solution will remain necessarily incomplete. Two basic difficulties of the Jordan-Elsasser view are absent in Bergson's "dualism" or "vitalism" - if we may be allowed to apply such lazy and simplifying cliches to the complex ideas of Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution. The first difficulty was created by the tendency of both Jordan and Elsasser to regard the organism as a sort of mechanical dice-shaker. An overt reaction, while being undetermined, is then teleologi• cal only accidentally, since nothing in their theory guarantees 'a happy outcome', that is, the correlation between a microphysical triggering event and an appropriate motor response. This difficulty is absent in Bergson's explanatory scheme, since the triggering microphysical event, instead of being an isolated and statistically improbable happening, is a terminal phase of the process by which the feeling of effort, voluntary fiat, mental option - the terminology itself is less relevant - becomes effective on the physical level. Such a view was an utter absurdity in the deterministic scheme of classical physics and a glaring inconsistency in the classical dualism; but it was not so in Bergson's conceptual scheme. For matter in his scheme - like matter of contemporary physics - is no longer impervious to the causal efficacy of the mental qualia, since novelties exist both on the physical and the mental level, though in different degrees. In other words, the difference between the mental and the physical is far from being as sharp as in Cartesianism or neo• Cartesianism. As explained above, it is a difference of temporal span, with a correlated difference in degree of extension and degree of indeterminacy. Since this temporal span varies, the transition between the mental and the physical becomes intelligible and thus loses the thoroughly irrational character which it had in the classical dualism. If we realize this, we shall better understand the words by which Bergson concludes his essay 'L'effort intellectuel': This operation, which is the very operation of life, consists in the gradual passage from the less realized to the more realized, from the inextensive to the extensive, from a reciprocal implication of parts to their juxtaposition. Intellectual effort is something of this kind. In analysing it, I have pressed as far as I could, on the simplest and at the same time the most abstract example, the growing materialization of the immaterial which is characteristic of vital activity.29 MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 359

It would be beyond the scope of this book to analyze the examples to which Bergson refers in this passage. They range from the creation of new motor habits to a conscious effort to recall a reluctant recollection and, finally, to the highest instances of artistic and intellectual creation. Suffice it to say that the words 'the growing materialization of the immaterial' which has a deceptively mystical ring to our Cartesian ears, conditioned by the three centuries of the 'bifurcation of nature', have the precise meaning which we have lengthily analyzed in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of Part III. But this leads us to the second difficulty, present in Jordan's and, apparently, also in Elsasser's scheme. While Jordan avoids the fallacious exclusion of the very possibility of choice in the name of a non-existent rigorous determinism, he makes an epistemologically impossible assertion in correlating choice on the mental level with a single event on the physical- or rather microphysical-level. As already mentioned, Jordan, whether he realized it or not, was proposing a modified version of the double-aspect theory, adjusted to the principle of indeterminacy. Recall Zilsel's cogent objection against it. This objection might have been well formulated by Bergson himself for whom the absence of one-to-one correlation between the physical and the mental is the basis for his criticism of the double-aspect theory in Matter and Memory. The central idea of this book may be characterized as a 'one-to-many correlation' between the mental and the physical. For what else is the fact, stressed by Bergson, that a simple, indivisible mental quality is contempo• rary with an exceedingly large number of successive events on the physical level? The term 'one-to-many correlation between the physical and the mental' is thus appropriate, provided we remain aware of the limitations which the usual connotations of the words 'one' and 'many' have when they are applied to any temporal process. A more detailed analysis will shed some light on the mechanism or, more accurately, the dynamism, of the causal efficacy of mind as under• stood by Bergson. To make this analysis complete it would be necessary to take into account the cerebral milieu into which conscious initiative is inserted. In this respect, concrete analysis is very difficult and cannot be undertaken here. For every act is, as Bergson himself repeatedly stressed, a mixture of automatism and spontaneity, of the motor mecha• nisms and conscious initiative; in truth, from the time of his first book 360 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

Bergson stressed the rare character of free action.3o We 'are acted upon' (no us sommes agis) far more frequently than we act (nous agissons) in the authentic sense. We must refer again to the books Matiere et memoire and L'energie spirituelle in which the relation of consciousness to cerebral events is discussed concretely and in detail. But even if we consider the physical efficacy of the mental in general, that is, without taking into account the concrete cerebral milieu into which it is placed, we reach interesting conclusions. As pointed out above, the act of will, considered introspectively, has a certain temporal, existential minimum, a certain shortest duration which still enormously surpasses the duration of the elementary physical events. "The growing materialization of the immaterial" in this case cannot mean anything except that the durational tension, which made a single temporal Gestalt of the mental quality of volition, is loosened in the sense analyzed in detail in Chapter 4 of Part III. In other words, the indivisible psychological present is disintegrated into a large number of successive and extremely short 'sub-presents'. When the relaxation of this tension is sufficiently quickened, the resulting 'pulsations' will be of the same mnemic span as the elementary events constituting the physical reality. There is then, on the physical level the sudden appearance of a great number of contingent events whose effect is added precisely because of their nearly simultaneous appearance. This seems to be the meaning of the following passage in Bergson's Huxley lecture:

Placed at the confluence of consciousness and matter, sensation condenses, into the duration which belongs to us and characterizes our consciousness, immense periods of what we can call by analogy the duration of things. Must we not think, then, that if our perception contracts material events in this way it is in order that our action may dominate them? Supposing the necessity inherent in matter be such that at each of its moments it can be forced, but only within extremely restricted limits, how in such case must a consciousness proceed, if it would insert a free action into the material world, let the action to be no more than releasing a spring or directing a movement? Would it not have to adopt precisely this method? Should we not expect between its duration and the duration of things a difference of tension such that innumerable instants of the material world could be held within one single instant of the conscious life, so that the desired action (l'action voulue), accomplished by consciousness in one of its moments, could be distributed over an enormous number of the moments of matter and so sum up within it the indetermination almost infinitesimal which each of them admits? In other words, is not the tension of the duration of conscious being a measure of its power of acting, of the quantity of free creative activity it can introduce into the world? I hold that it is .... 31 (Italics added.) MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 361

To forestall some pedantic linguistic objections, let us add that the terms 'consciousness' and 'things' are used by Bergson for the purpose of abbreviation. He neither separates consciousness in the old substan• tialistic sense from concrete psychological changes nor is he unaware that substantial 'things' do not exist on the microphysical level. All this is quite obvious to anybody who recalls insistence, on Bergson's part, on the reality of "change without substratum" in both physics and psychology. The passage is similar to that which appeared two decades later in La Pensee et Ie Mouvant and to another passage in Matter and Memory fifteen years yearlier - another indication of the continuity of Bergson's thought. 32 The durational tension of the perceptual qualities is necessary for our macroscopic and macrochronic, that is, deterministic, perspective of matter. Without it "our action would be dissolved" or, more accurately, it would lose its macroscopic efficacy; it would be on a par with other' short-lived, random, microphysical events. Paradoxically, the deter• ministic perspective in perception is necessary for action transcending determinism. But the paradox is only apparent; the understanding of it will help us to see what is common and what is different in a micro• physical chance-event and an action stemming from conscious choice. An element of novelty is present on both the physical and mental level ; but on the former it is 'infinitesimal', more accurately negligible, for practical purposes. In the Bergsonian terminology, each physical event is an almost identical repetition of its immediate ancestor; its novelty barely transcends its own past. 33 Furthermore, the effect of this novelty is cancelled in the over-all interaction of the elementary chance-events so that on the macroscopic level it can be safely disregarded. This mutual cancelling of the elementary chance-activities is the basis of the stability and regularity of matter as it appears to us in the macrochronic perspec• tive. The reason for this is not difficult to see; for, as Ralph S. Lillie observec4 when chance events are repeated a sufficient number of times, they distribute themselves equally in all possible directions; hence an impulse in one direction is sooner or later compensated for or reversed by an impulse in the opposite direction. "Accordingly, chance activities cancel one another out and cannot by themselves lead to progressive differentiation, evolution, or complex organization." 34 Bergson expressed the same idea in his own panpsychistic language: when in the concluding 362 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS part of Matter and Memory he wrote that "nature may be regarded as a neutralized and consequently latent consciousness, consciousness of which the eventual manifestations hold each other in check, and annul each other precisely at the moment at which they might appear." 35 Only very exceptionally do the elementary chance-events happen to act in the same sense so that a cumulative effect results. Such additive interference of the elementary events may be the cause ofthe radioactive explosions in which the extremely small probability of the alpha-particles escaping from the nucleus is realized. (A macroscopic analogy - imperfect, because it is deterministic - of this phenomenon is an accidental additive interference of elementary wavelets inside of a glass of water which results in the temporary creation of a high crest of the liquid spilling over the rim of the vessel.) Now the conscious biological reaction outwardly resembles such a phenomenon in the sense that its immediate antecedent consists in a very complex and improbable correlation of the elementary contingencies. It is their correlation, that is, their nearly simultaneous occurrence which assures their combined, interferentia1ly reinforced effect instead of their normal cancellation. This is in agreement with Elsasser's definition of life as "the presence of correlation among the multitude of physically indeterminate events".36 But this correlation is not an accidental coinci• dence, as Jordan, and apparently also Elsasser, thought. It is an outward manifestation of the total temporal Gestalt, introspectively perceived as voluntary fiat; in truth, the correlated physical events were generated by a sudden temporal deconcentration ('dilution', 'distension') of this mental quality. Only in this way can Driesch's concept of Ganzheitskausalitiit become intelligible; it was not so in his neo-Cartesian dualistic and deterministic scheme. The microphysical effect thus produced is then amplified by activating the energy stored in the motor mechanism of the cerebro-spinal system with the resulting overt reaction taking place 'in the desired moment, at the desired spot, in the desired direction'. In this way the generally teleological character of conscious reactions, which remains so puzzling in the Jordan-Elsasser theory, is explained. Bergson's view is similar to the view expressed considerably later by the biologist Ralph S. Lillie: According to the present view, some element of indeterminacy - in the sense of present determination, or internal determination, or what may be called "spontaneity" - is MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 363 always present in a natural event, but to a degree which varies greatly in the different instances. Within the vital organization this internal indetermination is apparently able to express itself in a way which is not possible in nonliving systems ... This condition reaches its maximum in the more complex types of biological causation such as human activity, although it is there limited in its possibilities by physical and physiological constants already established, as well as by social and other environmental conditions.37 It is also immediately clear why this view is compatible with the fact that organic life does and always will appear to the eyes, to the microscope - and unfortunately even to the intellect of an experimental biologist - only in its physico-chemical, that is, its deterministic aspect. Every process taking place in the organism and in its nervous system appears to an external observer as an extremely complicated network of causal chains and only by their complexity do they differ from other physico-chemical causal chains in inorganic nature. The fact that some of these causal chains are activated by a conscious initiative whose immediate, triggering, physical effect is too tiny to be detected, since it is on the scale of quantum mechanical indeterminacies, naturally escapes the attention of the majority of biologists and psychologists.3s Hence the prevailing tendency among them to regard the difference between a reflex action and conscious decision as one of degree; the latter, according to them, is nothing but a more complex form of the former - a mere extension of the external stimulus into the motor paths, modified by its detour through the cortical engrams. Bergson's view is considerably different from that ridiculed by Eddington and by the positivistic critics of Jordan according to which the overt reactions would depend on a single microphysical contingency somewhere in the neural tissue. The simile of a single switch activating a complex motor mechanism is obviously grossly inaccurate; it would be far more appropriate to speak of a whole keyboard of switches activated by a single decision in the sense of the previously exposed one-to-many correlation. In this sense Bergson's view is different from that of Ralph S. Lillie's correlation between the physical and the mental 39 while it is very close to the view of Eddington who wrote in 1928 that "in the physical part of the brain directly affected by the mental decision" the crowd of atoms has "a configuration which the secondary laws of physics would set aside as too improbable"4o and the interdependence of behavior "which is not present in inorganic matter". If we abstract from the traditional and crudely visual connotations of words like 'atom' and 'configuration' which 364 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

Eddington used for abbreviative purposes only, it is clear that the "im• probable configuration of atoms affected by mental decision" is nothing but another term for the additive interference of the microphysical events which were generated by the deconcentration of a single mental quality. We must also not forget that the term 'improbable' is justified only if we confine ourselves to the exclusively physical, so to speak 'external', point of view. If a physicist or a physiologist were able to observe under the microscope the conscious reaction of the organism originated in the motor zone of the brain - which, as Bohr convincingly pointed out, is and will be impossible - he would be overwhelmed by the marvellously precise cooperation of the enormous number of physical elements corresponding to the introspectively simple mental quality of decision. Either this astonishment overwhelms him entirely and then he slips into anthro• morphism in imagining "statically ready-made particles juxtaposed to one another, and, also statically, an external cause which plasters upon them a skilfully contrived organization". 41 Or he will remain on the terrain of physics and will then speak of "realized improbability" or "chance coincidence". While the first view is naively anthropomorphic - the entelechy (whether of Aristotle or that of Hans Driesch) always bears a similarity to the planning activity of homo faber - the latter errs in regarding the central microphysical events triggering the outgoing reaction as externally related; from such a point of view their correlation is always nothing but a miraculous chance-coincidence and the resulting purpose• fulness is a/ways, as Taine observed, "a happy accident". Bergson, as we know, rejected naive finalism as much as mechanism; finalism for him is nothing but "inverted mechanism".42 But he would have been equally opposed to what Bohm called "indeterministic mechanism". While not denying the mutual externality of the triggering contingent events, he regarded them as the final phase of the process of "the growing materiali• zation of the immaterial" referred to above. The correlation and cooper• ation of the contingent events betray their common origin which their discontinuity belies. In a similar way the letters on a piece of paper - from the physical point of view the mere irregular and scattered black spots - only by their mutual correlations - by their 'order' or 'arrangement' - betray their origin in the indivisible inspiration which threw them on the paper. If the self-appointed guardians of rationality are shocked by Bergson's MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 365

dualism and interactionism, it is because, first, they confuse the rationality of mechanism with rationality in general; second, they fail to understand that Bergson's dualism is basically different from the traditional dualism of Descartes and Driesch - "para-mechanistic" as Gilbert Ryle called it - and it is thus free of their difficulties and absurdities inherent in any sharp 'bifurcation of nature'; that this bifurcation is avoided in Bergson's view which, instead of opposing the fictitious absolute indeterminacy of 'free will' to the rigid necessity of the Laplacean type, proposes the theory of different degrees of freedom and - correlatively - of different degrees of causality in the sense hinted at much more recently by Norbert Wiener. 43 Only in this context can John Dewey's profound remark that micro• physical indetermination is a necessary, though not sufficient condition of freedom acquire an intelligible meaning. 44 In other words: the psycho• physical interaction which remained an utter irrationality in the classical deterministic framework, ceased to be so in the genuinely growing and temporalistic universe whose most important features were foreseen by Bergson prior to its discovery by contemporary physics.

NOTES

1 L. Cuenot, Invention et finalite en bi%gie, Paris, 1941. 2 N. Bohr, Die Atomtheorie und Naturbeschreibung, Berlin, 1931, p. 89. 3 P. Jordan, 'Quantenmechanik und Grundprobleme der Biologie und Psychologie', Naturwissenschaften XX (1932) 815-821; 'Quantenphysikalische Bermerkungen zur Biologie und Psychologie', Erkenntnis IV (1934) 215-252. 4 W. Elsasser, 'Quantum Mechanics, Amplifying Processes and Living Matter', Philosophy of Science XXVIII (1951) 3()()"'325; 'A Reformulation of Bergson's Theory of Memory', Philosophy of Science XX (1953) 7-21. 5 'Life and Consciousness' in M.E., p. 14. 6 M.E., ibid. 7 C.E., p. 127. 8 W. Elsasser, the first article quoted above, pp. 306--307. 9 C.E., pp. 127-128; cf. also a similar passage in M.E., p. 35: "I quite agree that, if the will is capable of creating energy, the quantity created may be so small that it would not affect sensibly our instruments of measurement. Yet its effect might be enormous, like that of the spark which explodes in a powder magazine ... It will then require an almost negligible action, such as the slight pressure on the hair-trigger of a pistol, in order to liberate at the required moment, in the direction chosen, as great an amount as is wanted of accumulated energy. The glycogen lodged in the muscles is, in fact, a real explosive; by it voluntary movement is accomplished: to make and utilize explosives of this kind seems to be the unvarying and essential preoccupation of life, from its first apparition in protoplasmic masses, deformable at will, to its complete expansion in organisms capable of free action." 366 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

10 M.E., p. 43. 11 C.E., pp. 139-140. 12 W. James, The Principles of Psychology, I, Ch. V ('The Automaton Theory'), esp. p.I40. 13 F. Nietzsche, Gotzendiimmerung, Werke, VIII, Leipzig, 1895, p. 96. 14 Th. Ziehen, Introduction to Physiological Psychology (London, 1892), p. 273-274. 15 James, op. cit., I, p. 452. James added significantly: "No measurements are yet performed (it is safe to say that none ever will be performed) which can show that it contributes energy to the result." - On James' views on this problem cf. my article 'James' Early Criticism of the Automaton Theory', Journal of the History of Ideas XV, pp.260-279. 16 C. S. Peirce, 'Doctrine of Necessity Examined', in Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, (ed. by C. Harthsome and P. Weiss), VI, pp. 42-43. 17 Cf. Driesch's book Relativitiitstheorie und Weltanschauung, Leipzig, 1930. 18 Erkenntnis V 1935, pp. 178-184; H. Winterstein, 'Der mikrophysikalische Vitalis• mus', Erkenntnis VII (1937-38),81-91. 19 H. Reichenbach, 'Metaphysik bei Jordan?' 01'. cit., pp. 178-179. 20 E. BUnning, 'Sind die Organismen die mikrophysikalische Systeme?', Erkenntnis V (1935) 337-347; Reichenbach, loco cit., p. 179; Jordan's rejoinder in Erkenntnis V, pp. 348-353. 21 M. Schlick, 'Erganzende Bermerkungen Uber P. Jordan's Versuch einer quanten• mechanischer Deutung der Lebenserscheinungen, Erkenntnis V, pp. 181-183. 22 P. Frank, 'Jordan und radikale Positivismus', ibid., p. 184. 23 Cf. Note 20. 24 Cf. Erkenntnis IV, p. 243. 25 Th. Ribot, The Diseases of Will (transl. from the 8th French edition by M. M. Snell), Chicago, 1896, p. 96. 26 The Nature of the Physical World, p. 313. 27 E. Zilsel, 'P. Jordan's Versuch den Vitalismus zu rechnen', Erkenntnis V, p. 63. 28 John R. Platt, 'Amplification Aspects of Biological Response and Mental Activity', American Scientist 44 (1956) 180-197. 29 M.E., p. 7. 30 T.F. W., p. 167. 31 M.E., pp. 16-17. 32 M.M., pp. 218-219; C.M., pp. 68-69. 33 M.M., p. 220: "If matter does not remember the past, it is because it repeats the past unceasingly, because, subject to necessity. it unfolds a series of moments of which each is the equivalent of the preceding moment and may be deduced from it; thus its past is truly given in the present." In the passage already quoted (p. 244-245) Bergson foresaw that the physical necessity is not absolute, but only very approximate and as such hides to us the elementary contingency of the physical events. 34 Ralph S. Lillie, General Biology and Philosophy of Organism, University of Chicago Press, 1945, p. 197. 35 M.M., p. 245. 36 W. Elsasser, Philosophy of Science XX (1953) 8. 37 Lillie, 01'. cit., p. 107; cf. also his article 'Biological Causation' in Philosophy of Science VII (1940) 336. 38 This deceptively deterministic aspect of life which hides to us the quantitatively insignificant, but crucially important creative innovations was stressed by the out- MICROPHYSICAL INDETERMINACY AND FREEDOM 367 standing American biologist Sewall Wright in the concluding part of his article 'Gene and Organism', The American Scientist 87 (1953) 16-17. 89 Ralph S. Lillie (op. cit., pp. 81-82, 130) seems to share Leibniz's view about the completely extra-spatial character of the mental and the vital activity which leads him logically to the "single key-atom" theory which Elsasser (Philosophy oj Science XVIII, p. 300) rejects. 40 A. S. Eddington, The Nature oj the Physical World, pp. 312-314. A similar view is that of Hermann Weyl in Was ist Materie?, Berlin, 1924, p. 84. 41 C.E., p. 272. 42 C.E., pp. 45-50. 43 N. Wiener, I am a Mathematician, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1964, p. 323. 44 John Dewey, The Quest Jor Certainty, Hilton & Balch Co., New York, 1929, pp. 289-250. APPENDIX III

BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY

In his very complimentary report submitted to the French Academy of Sciences on January 23, 1909 on Emile Meyerson's book L'Identite et Realite, Bergson briefly outlined the main theses of its author. First, that the essential feature of every explanation is identification in time and space which, pushed to its extreme consequences, leads to the elimination of both succession and diversity; hence the latent Eleatism of human intellect. Second, that while reality yields to a considerable degree to such identifying explanations, it nevertheless resists a complete elimination of succession and diversity; third, that this resistance shows itself in the discovery of the law of entropy (or 'the principle of Carnot', as it is called in French) which, contrary to the identifying tendencies of the classical explanations, discloses the intrinsic irreversibility of time. 1 It was only natural that Bergson welcomed Meyerson's epistemological theses which were so much in agreement with his own criticism of the static and monistic tendencies, characterizing the classical form of human intellect.. Nor was it surprising that he welcomed Meyerson's interpreta• tion of the significance of the law of entropy. Only one year before the pUblication of L'ldentite et realite, he expressed the same view in his L' Evolution creatrice i.e. that the irreversibility of time found its expres• sion in the second principle of thermodynamics: "it is the most metaphys• ical of the laws of physics since it points out without interposed symbols, without artificial devices of measurements, the direction in which the world is going." 2 To him the irreversibility of physical time was a mere consequence of the irreversibility of becoming in general. For, since, ac• cording to him, becoming constitutes the very nature of every reality, it cannot be absent even in the physical world, contrary to the trends of clas• sical physics and contrary even to his original view stated in his first book. This metaphysical context of his own doctrine accounts for what dif• ferentiates Bergson's view of the second law of thermodynamics from BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 369 that of many physicists, who defined the irreversibility or - as they call it - 'direction' of physical time by the increase of entropy. Now it is clear that for several reasons Bergson could not share such view. In the first place, the gradual increase of entropy was for him merely one manifesta• tion of the 'unidirectionality' of time or irreversibility of becoming in general, not anything identical with it or something by which becoming could be exhaustibly characterized. There are other kinds of irreversibility which attracted Bergson's attention before: the irreversibility ofpsycholo• gical duration in his first two books and the irreversibility of organic evolution in Creative Evolution. As pointed out in this book, he believed that an attentive analysis of psychological duration will disclose the general structure of every duration. The exclusive identification of irre• versibility with the increase of entropy would confine duration to the physical realm only, contrary to his basic claim that irreversible becoming is an all pervasive feature of reality. Second, the identification of 'the direction of time' with the increase of entropy has been - and is still being - carried out within the larger framework of the relational theory of time. Now it is true that we can speak meaningfully of the relational theory of time in Bergson. But we must define it carefully in order to differentiate it clearly from the rela• tional theory of the physicists speculating about the significance of the second law of thermodynamics. For there are two very different kinds of the relational theory: one, the tradition of which goes back to Aristotle and Heraclitus; the second, whose roots reach back to Lucretius and ancient atomism. Bergson clearly belongs to the Heraclitus-Aristotle tra• dition. While both these theories agree that "time is nothing in itself", that is, that it is inseparable from concrete changes and events, they differ substantially on the nature of these events. According to Heraclitus, Aristotle and Bergson, time is constituted by qualitative, irreversible changes: "one cannot step twice into the same river." According to atom• ism, time is correlated with the changing configurations of the particles which themselves are beyond change, that is, immutable, indestructible and uncreatable. This view re-emerged in the modern corpuscular-kinetic model of nature in an improved and more exact form. It still retained the basic claim of Epicurus that time is nothing but an 'accident of accidents', that is, the function of the changing configurations of the unchanging particles. (It is true that there were some important dissenters who, like 370 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

Gassendi and Newton, insisted on the independence of time from its physical content; but since they correlated time with 'the divine duration', they were very close to the first type of the relational theory of time. In truth, it is doubtful that any theory of completely absolute, altogether empty time can be even meaningfully formulated.) Now since nothing in principle prevents the possibi1!ty that any configuration will eventually recur, the past situation can return, the 'direction of time' may be reversed and time itself, whether on the cosmic or a local scale, be cyclical. If the giant configuration of all the elements constituting the universe and defining its 'state at a certain moment', will recur, the cosmic time itself would be cyclical as the Stoics in antiquity and Nietzsche in the last century believed; if such a situation will occur only on a local scale, there would be no cosmic time at all since it would be resolved into the multi• plicity of local 'time segments', running in opposite directions and each of them changing its direction after sufficiently long intervals of time. In other words, the irreversibility of becoming would cease to be the universal feature and would become contingent and local-local both in the spatial and temporal sense. "Change must be reducible to an arrangement and rearrangement of parts; the irreversibility of time must be an appearance relative to our ignorance; the impossibility of turning back must be only the inability of man to put things back to their original place." 3 Those are the very words by which Bergson characterized the corpuscular• kinetic model of the universe; and since he rejected this model, he ipso facto rejected the relational theory of time implied in it. lt was then only consistent for him to try to express the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics in a language free of corpuscular-kinetic terms. If the universe is an intrinsically irreversible process, then every physical law must, in principle at least, be expressible in the terms of events or changes without any surreptitious reference to some immutable particles which merely change their positions without changing themselves:

It [i.e. the second law of thermodynamics] tells us that changes that are visible and heterogeneous will be more and more diluted into changes that are invisible and homogeneous, and that the instability to which we owe the richness and variety of the changes taking place in our solar system will gradually give way to the relative stability of elementary vibrations continually and perpetually repeated... From this point of view, a world like our solar system is seen to be ever exhausting something of the mutability it contains. In the beginning it had the maximum of possible utilization of energy; this mutability has gone on diminishing unceasingly.4 BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 371

By the word "mutability" (mutabilite in French) Bergson translates the term Umwandelbarkeit, literally 'transformability' (i.e. of energy) which Boltzmann used in that part of his book to which Bergson in this context refers. In Boltzmann's words, the difference between the entropy and its maximum value, which is the 'driving force' (das Treibende) of all natural processes, is continually diminishing; thus despite the constancy of the total energy its mutability (Umwandelbarkeit) will become smaller and smaller, the development of nature becoming "more and more languid" (das Naturgeschehen immer matter).5 Bergson then considers the question which had been raised by a number of physicists and cosmogonists: what was the origin of the initial improb• able state of the 'maximum mutability' (i.e. the minimum entropy) within the solar system? If we assume that its source was in some region of space outside our solar system, we merely postpone the solution since the same question may be raised about that external region. The difficulty may be avoided by assuming the infinite number of the worlds "capable of passing the mutability to each other"; thus "the sum of mutability con• tained in the universe is infinite" and therefore there is no reason to seek its origin and its end. This idea of the universe everlastingly regenerating itself can be traced to some Presocratics, and in its modern form it appeared among those astronomers and physicists who wanted to avoid the inevitability of the 'heat death' of the universe. Thus Arrhenius, whose book appeared in the same year as Creative Evolution, believed that the cold portions of distant nebulae are warmed up by the impact of the fine particles ejected by the radiation of the stars; in this way 'the entropy clock' is re-wound at least on the local scale. Boltzmann, without being as specific as Arrhenius, also postulated the possibility of the entropy clock 'running backwards' in very remote parts of the universe. 6 To the objec• tion of Poincare that a local re-winding of the entropy clock would merely delay the thermal death of the universe, 7 Arrhenius could retort that this would not be true if the universe were infinite so that the radiation, instead of being dissipated in the surrounding void, would circulate from one system to another, compensating the lowering of the temperature in one system by increasing it in another. The assumption of the infinity of the universe was thus essential, if the final levelling of temperatures could be avoided. The infinity of the universe is impossible without the reality of infinite space. This Bergson rejected since he rejected any reification of 372 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS space. Such reification would mean, according to him, "an absolute externality of all the parts of matter in relation to one another" which was incompatible with his opposition to the doctrine of external relations and, more specifically, with his view that geometrical space is a mere ficti• tious instantaneous cut in the four-dimensional 'extensive becoming.' 8 Bergson then considered the second attempt to explain the original state of maximum 'mutability': "Again it might be supposed that the general instability has arisen from a general state of stability; that the period in which we are now, and in which the utilizable energy is diminish• ing, has been preceded by a period in which the mutability was increasing, and that the alternation of increase and diminution succeeded each other forever." In other words, that the entropy of the systems is alternatingly increasing and decreasing. The same idea is implied in the hypothesis previously considered; for although it stresses the simultaneous existence of the systems with the opposite entropy gradients, it assumes that by their interaction the situation will be reversed: the entropy originally increasing in one system will tend to decrease while the opposite will be true for the other system. Thus the only essential difference between these two hypotheses, which Bergson considered, is that the first one explicitly assumed the infinity of the universe while the second does not. An example of the second was Rankine's model of the universe which assumed not only the finiteness of the cosmic mass, but also the finite extent of the world-aether; the boundaries of the aether were then acting as 'reflecting walls' which prevented the luminous vibrations from escaping into the surrounding void and thus made 'the reconcentration of energy' possible.9 In rejecting the second hypothesis, Bergson erroneously enlisted the support of Boltzmann. It is true that Boltzmann spoke about an extremely small probability of the reversion of the entropy slope, and Bergson rather loosely concluded that "the mathematical improbability of it passes all imagination and practically amounts to absolute impossibility". He failed to realize that, as Reichenbach stressed more recently, by the very nature of probability sequences "every combination of attributes that has a non-zero probability must occur with a non-zero frequency."lO In other words, with the limitless duration at our disposal the reversion of the entropy slope on the local and even on the cosmic scale eventually must happen. This, indeed, was Boltzmann's view since only in this way is his dismissal of the unique cosmic time justifiable: "For the universe BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 373 both directions of time are indistinguishable in the same way as in space no 'up' and 'down' exists.n This, needless to say, is completely contrary to Bergson's view and it is rather strange to see him to claim the support of the thinker who so consistently adhered to the corpuscular-kinetic model of the universe.1 2 This is even stranger since the rejection of such a model, as we have seen, is one of the cornerstones of Bergson's theory of matter. The only explanation of it is that Bergson overlooked the broader mechanistic context of Boltzmann's view which logically implied the reversibility of time, and, by identifying 'extreme improbability' with impossibility, he involuntarily 'bergsonized' Boltzmann's view. While he was entirely consistent in rejecting the reversibility of time, he needlessly burdened his argument by his claim of Boltzmann's alleged agreement. In truth, Bergson in the very next sentence, following the quotation from Boltzmann, states clearly that the solution to the problem of the initial improbable state of the maximum energy cannot be solved in the terms of the classical, corpuscular-kinetic model:

In reality, the problem remains insoluble as long as we keep on the ground of physics, for the physicist is obliged to attach energy to extended particles, and, even if he regards the particles as reservoirs of energy, he remains in space: he would belie his role if he sought the origin of these energies in an extra-spatial process. It is there, however, that it must be sought.13 Does this mean that the initial improbable state of the universe can be explained only in metaphysical, perhaps theological way? Does Bergson advocate the creation of the world in time? It apparently sounds so and it was understood so both by Bergson's disciple Jacques Chevalier as well as by Bergson's opponent Rene Berthelot. But Bergson's view was more ambiguous than both Chevalier and Berthelot believed.l4 An attentive analysis of the texts will show it clearly. It is true that the term 'extra-spatial' is to Bergson synonymous with 'ideal' or 'psychological'; thus it was easy for Chevalier to interpret this term in this particular context as "ideal on the cosmic scale", that is, in the sense of the instantaneous divine creation. What confirmed Chevalier in this interpretation was not only the wishful thinking of a loyal Roman Catholic who for years was exerting on Bergson a subtle, continuous and almost successful pressure to join Chevalier's own church; there were some other, less personal reasons. There is no question that Bergson had a very pronounced sympathy toward philosophicaljinitism which rejected 374 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS the concept of actual infinity as self-contradictory. This view was upheld by Herbart and Eugen Diihring in Germany and by Renouvier's neo• criticism in France. It is true that Bergson never quotes Renouvier; but he highly praised one of his followers, Fran~ois Evellin whose discussion of Zeno's paradoxes he regarded as "decisive."15 Now Evellin, like Renou• vier, held the view that Kant's antinomies are solvable, in other words, that they are no antinomies at all, since only the proofs of the theses are cogent, while those of the antitheses are spurious.I6 This means that in the first antinomy only the thesis must be accepted, the antithesis rejected: the world, according to Renouvier and Evellin, is finite both in its spatial and temporal extent. The elapsed eternity of past events is logically as impossible as any other actually infinite aggregate. Since Bergson, as we have seen, rejected the infinitude of space, his rejection of the infinity of the past would be only consistent. Furthermore, if we trust the information supplied relatively recently by Chevalier, Bergson rejected as early as in 1901 both spatial and tem• poral infinity of the universe in linking the thesis in the first antinomy with the thesis in the third antinomy: If there is the origin of all, if the duration is finite, there is freedom at the beginning of everything and, consequently, in the things themselves. If, on the contrary, there is no origin of the whole, if the duration is infinite and eternal, if there is no absolute begin• ning, there cannot be freedom within the series itself.l7 The influence of Renouvier, who never tired of stressing the correlation of infinitism and necessitarianism, seems to be quite probable here; in particular, the term 'absolute beginning' (Ie commencement absolu) was the very term Renouvier repeatedly used. Bergson's rejection of necessi• tarianism thus naturally led him in the direction of finitism and this prob• ably was the reason why he regarded the initial maximum state of entropy as 'zero time', the absolutely first, initial moment, antecedent to every other event, the beginning of the whole cosmic duration. But Bergson's rejection of the bottomless past or beginningless eternity was more hesitant and more ambiguous than Chevalier wanted us to believe. First, in speaking of the origin of the initial state of the universe he referred not to a single extra-spatial act, but to 'an extra-spatial process'. To be aware of this is more than a mere philological pedantry. For the word 'process' (processus in the original) suggests a continuous ac• tion rather than an instantaneous act. Furthermore, in the very next BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 375 paragraph in which Bergson tries to clarify the meaning of that 'extra• spatial process', we find the sentence containing Bergson's philosophy of matter in its maximum conciseness: "Extension, we said, appears only as a tension which interrupts itself."18 Needless to repeat our extensive commentaries made about it in Part III of this book. It has been made sufficiently clear that this process, which Bergson calls "the gradual passage from the inextensive to the extensive, from a reciprocal implica• tion of parts to their juxtaposition", is not an instantaneous act since it goes on all the time. It constitutes what the traditional metaphysics called "action of mind on matter" and, more generally, it is present wherever the rhythm of duration is 'quickened' in the sense explained in Part III. This interpretation is strengthened if we take into account another passage from the same section of Creative Evolution dealing with 'the ideal genesis of matter.' It precedes only by a few pages the discussion of the law of entropy:

The mystery that spreads over the existence of the universe comes in great part from this, that we want the genesis of it to have been accomplished at one stroke or the whole matter to be eternal. Whether we speak of creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality of the universe that we are considering at once. At the root of this habit of mind lies the prejudice ... the idea, common to materialists and to their opponents, that there is no really acting duration, and that the absolute - matter or mind - can have no place in concrete time ... From which it follows that everything is given once for all, and that it is necessary to posit from all eternity either material multiplicity itself, or the act creating this multiplicity, given in bloc in the divine essence. Once this prejudice is eradicated, the idea of creation becomes more clear, for it is merged in that of growth. But it is no longer then of the universe in its totality that we must speak.19

We can hardly have a more unambiguous rejection of both instantaneous creation and of the eternity of the universe. This apparently implies that Bergson did not regard the thesis and the antithesis of the first Kant's antinomy as logically exhaustive. But is it meaningful to say that the universe is neither eternal nor created in time (or, possibly 'with time' - cum tempore, as St. Augustine said)? And then how to reconcile this with Bergson's above mentioned leanings toward finitism? In this context two important clarifications are in place: one which considers the purely logical and linguistic aspect of this problem; the other which is based on modern cosmogony. As we shall see, they are not unrelated. First, taking into account all Bergson's utterances relevant to this prob- 376 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS lem, it is clear that he, indeed, did accept the finitistic thesis. But what he did question was the linguistic formulation of the thesis, in particular the use of the term 'world' which, according to him, illegitimately suggested the connotation of 'the universe in its totality.' The assumption of 'the universe in its totality' was, in his view, the postulate common to both the creationistic and eternalist thesis: in both views, "everything is given once for all', whether it is given in the eternal multiplicity of matter or "in the act creating this multiplicity, given in bloc in the divine essence." In other words, the true dilemma is: "the cosmic past is either finite or infinite", which must not be confused with the false dilemma "the universe is either eternal or was created at once." This is an important distinction which classical cosmogony entirely ignored. Kant's first antinomy was certainly understood as the opposition between creationism and eternalism. Kant himself understood it in this way, and so was it understood by the majority of the nineteenth century physicists and philosophers, whether they favored the thesis or the anti• thesis. The finiteness of the past, suggested by the generalization of the law of entropy, was interpreted as an argument for the creation. This is quite often true even now; in this respect the situation has hardly changed since Stewart-Tait's book The Unseen Universe to Sir James Jeans' The Universe around Us, to E. T. Whittaker's The Beginning and the End of the World or Milne's Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God. On the other side, it was the fear of 'supernaturalistic creationism' that moti• vated the opposition to the generalization of the second law of thermo• dynamics among scientists and philosophers, such as Herbert Spencer, Ernest Hackel, Friedrich Nietzsche and Svante Arrhenius. The case of Eugen Diihring who found the finiteness of the cosmic past compatible with his uncompromising atheism, was an exception, - perhaps the only one. This situation ceased to be so clear-cut in com temporary cosmology and cosmogony and nothing indicates their revolutionary character more than the way in which they undermined the very conceptual foundations on which the first Kantian antinomy was erected. As far as space is con• cerned, the general theory of relativity together with Riemannian geo• metry brought about a very important distinction: the terms 'infinite' and 'limitless' which were synonymous in classical Euclidian cosmology, are not so any longer. Kant, in this respect following Euclid and Newton, BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 377 used these terms interchangeably as his formulation of the first antinomy clearly shows; the possibility that the universe could be both limitless and finite clearly did not occur to him. Modern cosmology did nothing analogous at first to the part of the antinomy dealing with time. Time in Eistein's original cosmological model- the so called 'cylindrical' one - is as infinite and without beginning as the Newtonian time. The modification which modern cosmogony brought to the formulation of the first antinomy came later and was of a different kind: it challenged the traditional identification of finitism and creationism described above. But this challenge came only with Lemaitre's theory of the expanding universe. Professor Gonseth in his introduction to Lemaitre's book The Prime• val Atom wrote that its author succeeded in overcoming Kant's first antinomy.2o It would probably have been more accurate to say that Lemaitre showed that the antinomy was formulated in a misleading, in• adequate way. Neither the thesis nor antithesis denied the infinity of both time and space. They only disagreed whether the physical universe - not space nor time - are limited or without limits; in other words, whether the universe began in time (and has its limits in space) or not. This is evi• dent in the very wording of the thesis: "The world has a beginning in time ... " 21 Thus what the first thesis denied was the elapsed eternity of the material universe, but not the beginningless eternity of the physically empty duration prior to 'the date of creation.' This was especially clear in the thought of Gassendi and Newton. Thus the so-called finitistic thesis in Kant's first antinomy was in truth crypto-injinitistic since it silently assumed the infinity of both space and time. This assumption was based on another basic distinction characterizing classical physics and cosmology: that between the container-like space and time and their physical content. This was the very essence of Newton's absolutism: both space and time because of their independence from their physical content are unlimited even if the physical reality is neither infinite nor eternal. It would hardly be fair to judge Kant too severely for his inability to formu• late the first thesis in other terms than those which the Newtonian physics provided - the only ones available at that time. It is hardly necessary to state again that this distinction between the physical 'content' and its spatio-temporal 'container' has been wiped out and in this way the con• ditions have been created for a completely new reformulation of the first 378 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS antinomy. From now on the question is not any longer whether the world is infinite in space and time, but whether space and time themselves are such. This re-formulation is a direct consequence of the merging of matter• energy and its changes with the dynamic structure of time-space. We have seen how this reformulation affected the wording and the solution of that part of the antinomy which deals with space. Now let us see how it affects the time-part of the same antinomy. Einstein's 'cylindrical' model of the universe was of a short duration. It still retained two classical features; it claimed that on the cosmic scale both space and time could be regarded as separable and thus in a sense absolute; time, in addition, was infinite in both directions. Space, being Riemannian, possesses a constant radius of curvature since the fluctua• tions of its curvature on the local scale which account for the phenomena of gravitation can be disregarded when the universe at large is considered. Thus, in Whitrow's words, "relativity is reduced to a local phenomenon."22 Einstein's model was thus static; its short life was due first to the mathe• matical proof of its instability, but, primarily, to the empirical discovery of the recession of the nebulae and Hubble's law. This led to its replacement by various dynamical models of the expanding universe. Lemaitre's model was one of these. It rather boldly linked the recession of the galaxies with the second law of thermodynamics, reinterpreted in the terms of quantum theory. While the total amount of energy remains the same, it is continually being fragmented into an ever increasing num• ber of quanta, each of which possesses lesser and lesser energy and, con• sequently (according to Planck's relation E=hf) a longer and longer wave length. The dissipation of energy consists precisely in this continual frag• mentation. "If we go back in the course of time we must find fewer and fewer quanta, until we find all the energy of the universe packed in a few or even in a unique quantum." 23 In this way Lemaitre reached his con• clusion about the temporal beginning of the universe: the world history began by a 'super-radioactive explosion' of the original single quantum and the subsequent development of the universe is a continuation of this process of fragmentation into the increasing number of less energetic quanta. Since, according to Einstein's equation E=mc2 , to every energy corresponds a certain mass, Lemaitre's original superphoton can be equal• ly well called "the primeval atom" - the term which the title of Lemaitre's book made fairly familiar. BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 379

This was not the only consequence of the relativistic physics in this cosmogony. Another one was that the expansion of space and the explosion of the primeval superquantum had to be regarded as two aspects of one and the same process. This was an obvious consequence of the rela• tivistic fusion of time-space with its physical content. The explosion of the primeval atom did not take place in some pre-existing container-like space, nor was it an event which took place in time, but space and time themselves came into being with this initial, privileged event. This was an obvious consequence of the relational theory of time-space, that is, its inseparability from its physical content. To ask what was before the 'zero time' is as meaningless as to ask what is 'behind' Lemaitre's elliptical space. Such question would be meaningful in the absolutist Newtonian scheme which explicitly admitted the reality of physically empty space and time existing prior to the physical universe; but it is clearly devoid of meaning in any relativistic cosmology. The main reason why we dwelt on Lemaitre's cosmogony is that of all contemporary cosmogonies it comes closest to that sketched by Bergson in those few pages of Creative Evolution to which we referred. In the first place, it is finitistic: like that of Bergson, it rejects the infinity of both space and time. At the same time, it is not creationistic in the traditional sense: according to both Bergson and Lemaitre, the universe was created neither instantaneously nor ex nihilo since it has come into being by a gradual process. Although this process had a definite beginning, it did not come out of some antecedent physical and temporal void such as that postulated by Newton. Hardly anyone else criticized the concepts of nothingness and of temporal void ('Ie temps homogene') more severely than Bergson. Bergson stressed the indeterminacy of the future; so did Lemaitre when he wrote:

Oearly the initial quantum could not conceal in itself the whole course of evolution; but, according to the principle of indeterminacy, that is not necessary. Our world is now understood to be a world where something really happens; the whole story of the world need not have been written down in the first quantum like a song on the disc of a phonograph. (Italics added.) 24 The basic difference between the classical relativistic cosmology and that of Lemaitre is contained in this passage. The former was deterministic since it was believed that the microphysical indeterminacy can be safely disregarded on the megacosmic level; the latter by its very nature tried to 380 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS bridge the gap between the megacosmic and microcosmic levels. For such a gap has not existed in the past; the universe originated from the prime• val superquantum which was subject to the principle of indeterminacy. Thus the italicized words a world where something really happens have more than a mere Bergsonian ring. The dynamic aspect of the physical reality is as prominent in Lemaitre as in Bergson to the extent that even space itself is incorporated into the process. The dynamization of space, suggested by a proper interpretation of the Einstein's time-space, is further accentuated in Lemaitre's cosmogony; not only space in virtue of its expansion has no rigid immutable structure, but it is itself of derivative character, generated by the first cosmic event. Within the original undi• vided super quantum prior to its explosion, there was no spatial diversity at all; it began to appear only with the incipient fragmentation of the primeval atom. In Bergson's thought spatiality was also of derivative nature. By defining matter as "the tendency toward homogeneity and juxtaposition", Bergson tried in Matter and Memory to dim out a too sharp distinction which he drew between duration and extension in the first book. This was conceptually possible only by incorporating spatiality into duration, that is, by denying the reality of geometrical durationless space. Such space, as explained in Part III, is a mere ideal limit toward which physical reality tends without ever attaining it completely: "in conferring on matter the properties of pure space, we are transporting our• selves to the terminal point of the movement of which matter simply indicates the direction:"25 Similarly, in Lemaitre's model, the Euclidian space is a mere ideal limit of the cosmic evolution, never entirely attained: although the radius of curvature of the elliptical space is perpetually in• creasing, it will never become infinitely large. In other words, the con• tinually diminishing curvature of space will never entirely disappear as, in a two dimensional analogy, the surface of an ever increasing sphere will never become altogether flat. The march of physical reality toward a complete, though never entirely attained homogeneity of Euclidian space seems to be a feature common both to The Primeval Atom and Creative Evolution. This does not mean that Bergson anticipated the theory of the expan• ding space in any specific way. Such merit belongs to another Frenchman - A. Calinon who envisioned the possibility of a variable space constant as early as in 1889. 26 But in 1907 when Creative Evolution was published, BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 381

the general relativity theory still was not in existence; in truth, even when it was formulated, Bergson failed to be interested in it and to see the convergence of some of its conclusions with his own.27 Thus we should not be deceived by some of Bergson's metaphors as, for instance, when he wrote about "the center from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fire-works display".28 The similarity with Lemaitre's image of the explod• ing atom is indeed, striking, making the sarcasms of Berthelot and Ber• trand Russell far less effective than they appeared before the First World War.29 Yet, since Bergson clearly did not have in mind any non-Euclidian space, this similarity is largely coincidental. But not entirely coincidental: two general philosophical themes - the finiteness of space and time and, in particular, the incorporation of space into the cosmogonic process - are, without doubt common to both Bergson and Lemaitre. It was his em• phasis on process and his general distrust of the classical mechanistic models that led Bergson's thought in the general direction of Lemaitre's cosmogony. Furthermore, there was the third common philosophical theme which was really only a specific form of the seond one: the general tendency of matter toward homogeneity. As mentioned above, Bergson correlated this tendency with the increase of entropy, interpreted in a language free of the corpuscular-kinetic terms. Such interpretation was then not excep• tional; it was upheld by Mach, Duhem and, in general, by the energeticists. Mach in his Die Principien der Wiirmelehre, written a decade before Crea• tive Evolution, called the corpuscular interpretation of the entropy increase as an increase of molecular disorder 'highly artificial' (recht kunstlich) 30 and welcomed F. Wald's hint that the roots of the entropy law lie far deeper. Such views, though prophetic in a long run, nevertheless belonged to what now appears as an exaggerated reaction against mechanism, exaggerated because it failed to recognize the fruitfulness of mechanistic models on the molecular level. Bergson, in welcoming this premature reaction against mechanism, failed to realize that the successes of the kinetic theory of heat are perfectly compatible with his philosophy and, in particular, with his biological epistemology. For the molecular level still lies on the boundaries of the 'realm of the middle dimensions' where the inadequacy of the corpuscular-kinetic models is not yet visible. The real inadequacy of these models showed itself clearly only on the sub• molecular and subatomic level. 382 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

What appeared particularly doubtful in 1907 was Bergson's equation of the increase of entropy with the tendency toward homogeneity in nature, that is, with a gradual elimination of all physical differences. Rene Berthe• lot, writing a few years later, reminded Bergson that the increase of entropy does not eliminate the differences in the chemical constitution of bodies.31 Berthelot failed to realize that the immutability of chemical elements ceased to be a dogma after the discovery of radioactivity; but he could hardly have anticipated that the subsequent development of physics would make questionable the very concept of immutable particle even on the intranuclear level. (In truth, his attitude toward modern physics remained exceedingly negative as late as in 1934, when the inadequacy of the classical models had become undeniable. In fairness to him, it must be said that this was true of some other traditional rationalists such as Brunschwicg in France, Driesch in Germany, Blanshard in the U.S.32) What above all was not anticipated in 1912 was afar more general inter• pretation of the second law of thermodynamics which regards the gradual elimination of thermal differences as a mere special case of the passage from less probable to more probable states in nature. Although the pro• bability considerations played a very important role in classical thermo• dynamics, the assumption of the permanency of the basic material par• ticles was retained and Boltzmann himself regarded it as indispensable. In this respect even the electron theory of matter was regarded as a new and improved version of atomism and its successes were hailed as a decisive refutation of the doubts expressed by StaIlo, Mach, Ostwald and Duhem which were inspired more by epistemological reasons than by 0 bservations. The situation is obviously different now and it would be otiose to repeat what had been said about the crisis of the concept of substantial particle. In this way the conditions are created for a new interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics which is free of the corpuscular language in a way similar to that sketched in Bergson's passage quoted above. As mentioned there, within the framework of classical physics the process of gradual dissipation of energy could be characterized as 'homogeneiza• tion' only in a restricted sense: it would be merely the tendency to an equalization of temperatures. Even if we assume that all celestial and macroscopic bodies were eventually transformed into a molecular or atom• ic dust with the temperature approaching abolute zero, one fundamental distinction would be preserved: that between space and matter, between BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 383 the 'full' and the 'empty'. For this distinction was the very basis of the classical concept of matter - and matter itself, no matter how far pul• verized, would not disappear; the basic particles were supposed to persist everlastingly even in the 'thermal death' of the universe. In other words, the law of conservation of matter was perfectly compatible with the law of entropy. Today, after the coming of the relativity theory and the theory of quanta, the situation is significantly different. First, the special theory of relativity overcame the classical distinction between mass and energy: to every energy belongs a certain mass and vice versa. But then does not the law of dissipation of energy apply also to the internal energy which is contained in every material particle, including the electrons and nucleons? An affirmative answer would be only consistent and its plausibility is in• creased when the same question is approached from the standpoint of quantum theory. As mentioned above, in the language of the quantum theory the process of the dissipation of energy means that there is a gradu• al fragmentation of energy into smaller and smaller quanta. In Jeans's words, the increase of entropy is a special case of the tendency of every radiation to lengthen its wave length. 33 But according to wave mechanics, every energy, including the internal energy of the material particles, is of a vibratory kind; the difference between the electromagnetic radiation and matter itself is that the former is characterized by a smaller frequency and correspondingly longer wave length. If the law of dissipation of energy means a lengthening of the wave length of every kind of energy, it must apply to matter itself; which means a gradual transformation of matter into radiation.34 This was suggested by Sir James Jeans even prior to the discovery of the dematerialization of positive electrons. It is true that the opposite process - the materialization of photons - was discovered at the same time; but it is far less frequent. Thus in the words of Jacques Merleau-Ponty, "Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 conceals an essential dissymmetry."35 Within the framework of the generalized law of entropy this is under• standable: the electrons and nucleons represent more organized and, con• sequently, less probable structures than the photons and thus the trans• formation of matter into the field is far more probable and, therefore, more frequent than the opposite process. This continuous transformation of matter into radiation - 'into field', as Weyl would say - must be consid• ered jointly with the expansion of space: the waves into which 'the waves 384 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

of matter' (les ondes materielles of de Broglie) are lengthened are spreading into the ever expanding elliptical space. In truth, from the standpoint of the general relativity theory, the preposition 'into' is misleading since it is tinged by the outdated classical distinction between a container-like space and its physical content. It is far more appropriate to say that the expansion of space and the dilution of its energetic content go on together, both being two probably complementary aspects of one and the same process since they both result in a growing homogeneization of the phys• ical universe. There is no place here to dwell on empirical difficulties of Lemaitre's theory. The very fact that they exist explains why other cosmogonic models have been proposed since then. They fall into the three main categories: (a) other evolutionary models, according to which the universe either began or at least went through a major reorganization in the past; (b) oscillating models which assume that there are the alternating phases of the expansion and contraction. It is clear that the boundaries between these models are far from definite since it is always possible to assume that prior to the so-called 'zero-time', assumed by Lemaitre, Jeans, Milne and Whittaker, there was the period of contraction preceded by another expansion ... and so forth in irifinitum. Thus the oscillating models assume the infinity of the past; in this respect they agree with the third group (c) the stationary or steady state theories, proposed by Bondi, Gold and Hoyle. This group is closest to the eternalistic tradition of classical physics and classical philosophy; the so called 'perfect cosmological principle' is nothing but another formulation of the principle of 'the unity of nature in space and time', proclaimed by Bruno and Spinoza at the beginning of the classical period and since then continually reaffirmed. (In truth, nature is one even according to the finitistic models of the universe since there is literally nothing 'beyond' the elliptical space or 'before' zero time.) Will there be any decisive empirical test that would settle forever the dispute between finitism and infinitism? While the situation does not appear altogether hopeless concerning space, no decisive test is conceiv• able which would bring a definitive solution as far as time is concerned. It is true that the steady state theory in claiming that the universe had always the same appearance as it has now, implies consequences which are in principle falsifiable. But even if we assume that the observation of BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 385 very distant galaxies and of their distribution would decisively falsify the steady state theory, the finiteness of the past would still remain a mere hypothesis. A scientist or a philosopher resolutely committed to infinitism, can always postulate that prior to the so-called 'zero-time' there were the alternating cycles of contraction and expansion without any beginning. It is obvious that such a theory cannot be falsified; this was the reason why Gamow, whose views superficially appear to be finitistic, dismissed any question about the pre-expansion state of the universe as meaning• less - as meaningless as the question "what was God doing before the creation of the world." 36 But Gamow apparently conceded that such a stage had existed; in other words, his model, appearances notwithstand• ing, is eternalistic. With the impossibility of any conclusive empirical test the only way to approach this problem - that is, if it should be approached at all- is on a metaphysical or logical level. Since Bergson's leaning toward finitism was, as we had said, very probably influenced by the arguments of the French thinkers Renouvier and Evellin, it will be worth while to re-examine these arguments and confront them with those of their opponents. The finitistic thesis, following Aristotle in this respect, holds that the only legitimate concept of infinity is that of an open or potential kind; in this sense, time is potentially infinite since none of its moments is the last one; there is always a future beyond each provisionally last moment, and in the inexhaustibility of this future consists the infinity of time. On the other hand, 'actual infinity' is a contradiction in terms since it joins two incompatible features - completeness and inexhaustibility. Any infinite aggregate is both a whole and a negation of the whole which is impossible. Renouvier pointed out that Boethius' famous definition of eternity ex• hibits this contradiction in its very wording: Interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio.37 Now 'interminabilis' is clearly incompatible with 'tota simul'; nothing can be both at once ('simul'), that is complete, and at the same time incomplete. (In truth, Boethius uses even a stronger term: 'interminabilis' means incapable of completion.) From this point of view the only meaningful eternity is that of potential, futuristic kind; static eternity, such as the elapsed eternity of the past moments, is im• possible. For this reason, in the first antinomy of Kant it is the thesis which is correct and the antithesis which is wrong and the finitists certainly did accept the concluding words of Kant's argument for the thesis: "An 386 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS infinite aggregate of actual things cannot therefore be viewed as a given whole, nor consequently as simultaneously given." 38 As mentioned above, modern finitists understand the first thesis in a sense far more radical than Kant did: not only the universe, but time itself is finite since it is coextensive with the finite duration of the universe. In adopting the relational theory of time (and space), the post-Kantian finitists effectively answered the objection which Kant raised in his 'proof' of the first antithesis: that the first thesis implies the existence of empty time prior to the beginning of the world. This, as mentioned already, was true of Kant's own formulation of the thesis which was phrased in a Newtor,tian language; but it is certainly not true of the thesis once it is formulated in the terms of the relational theory. The cogency of the answer which the relational theory gives to Kant's objection was recently recog• nized by C. D. Broad: Then to say that the world had a beginning is simply to say that there was a certain event which was followed by others but was not preceded by any other event. To say that this event would "have been preceded by empty time" would come to this. It would amount to saying that it is logically possible that there should have been events which preceded the event which was in fact the first event. On this relational view of time the question: "Why did the world begin when it did, and not at some earlier or later moment?" would reduce to the question: "Why did the particular event, which in fact had no predecessors, not have predecessors?" 89 Such question is based obviously on a petitio principii; the assumption of beginningless time is present in its very wording. Among those who gave serious attention to the French neocriticist rejection of actual infinity was Louis Couturat whose book De l'infini mathematique appeared in the same year as Matiere et memoire (1896). Since this book was written ofter the epoch making work of George Cantor which he takes into account, it is instructive to survey the essence of his defense of actual infinity, especially since contemporary infinitists hardly improve upon it. Couturat presented the controversy in the form of a fictitious dialogue between the critics and the defenders of actual infinity. It is only natural that he identified himself with the defenders, even though he tried to present the finitistic views fairly and accurately. The main finitistic argu• ment against the existence of infinite aggregates was the impossibility of their enumeration; but such an objection remains valid only as long as the successive genesis enters into their definition. Hence the necessity of BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 387 a modified definition from which any reference to successive construction is eliminated. This is the meaning of Couturat's statement when, in the true spirit of Cantor, he says that infinite aggregates exist prior to, and independent of the enumeration of their members. Yet, Couturat is not very consistent in this approach to the problem. Only two pages after the passage in which he insisted on the independence of infinite wholes from enumeration, we come across the following curious lines:

When you say that an infinite aggregate can never be completely enumerated, such impossibility is neither intrinsic nor logical, but practical and material: it is merely a question of time, (Italics added.) 40

Does it mean that an infinite aggregate can be enumerated, i.e. its last ClOth term can be reached? It is true that Couturat insists that this cannot be done in a finite time; in the sentence immediately following the passage quoted above, he adds: 'Give me an infinite time and I take upon myself to enumerate an infinite aggregate." Couturat apparently does not realize that to say: "I shall complete this operation after an infinitely long time" is equivalent to: "I shall never complete this operation." The last sentence clearly shows that the illusion of actual infinity arises from the psycholo• gical fusion of two incompatible meanings: the first, suggesting the com• pletion of the operation ('I shall complete ... ') and the second, suggesting its incompleteness ('never'). The same contradiction comes up in another passage which has a direct bearing on the problem of the infinity of the past. Only one page after the quoted passage Couturat castigated Jean Bernoulli for 'imprudently conceding' that in any infinite sequence there is the ooth term "in the same sense that in the collection of ten terms there is the tenth term."41 This view, according to Couturat, is based on a false analogy: from the fact that there is an infinite cardinal number of the terms in the sequence, it does not follow that there is the last, ooth (infinitieme) ordinal number in it. It is not difficult to see that this passage directly contradicts his claim on a previous page that an enumeration of the infinite aggregate is possible, which means - if it means anything at all- that the last ordinal number can be reached. Couturat would undoubtedly stress that it can be reached only 'after an infinite interval of time' which means 'never', - the conclusion with which the finitists would heartily agree. But why then speak of 'completion' at all? 388 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

Couturat's criticism of Bernoulli was much more recently restated by Adolf Griinbaum; he insists that "it is the very essence of a progression not to have a last term and not to be completable in that ordinal sense!" 42 Neither Couturat nor Griinbaum nor any other infinitist realized that this argument, if accepted, is fatal to the doctrine of the beginningless past. For, if the totality of past events is an actually infinite whole, it should not have any attainable last term. Yet the same theory holds that this last, infinitieth and supposedly unattainable term is actually attained in the present moment in which I am living and, furthermore, that it has been attained in any previously present moment of the universe! Griin• baum would probably retort by insisting that 'now' has a mere subjective status. like becoming, from which it is inseparable; the objective physical world is devoid of either of them. It would be otiose to repeat my criticism of the neo-Eleatic metaphysics lurking behind such views. The self-contradictory character of elapsed eternity is the main reason why the finitists - some rephrasing apart - accept Kant's proof of the thesis in the first antinomy. How badly Kant's proof can be misunderstood even by an outstanding mind is shown by Bertrand Russell. He accused Kant of committing 'an elementary blunder'; but it is clear from the following comment that it was Russell who completely missed the essen• tial part of Kant's argument:

Kant, in his first antinomy, seems to hold that it is harder for the past to be infinite than for the future to be so, on the ground that the past is now completed, and that nothing infinite can be completed. It is very difficult to see how he can have imagined that there was any sense in this remark; but it seems most probable that he was thinking of the infinite as 'unended.' It is odd that he did not see that the future too has one end at the present, and is precisely on a level with the past.43 A strange passage indeed, whose purported meaning is revealed only in the last sentence: Russell clearly believes in a complete symmetry between the past and the future and in a complete subjectivity or irrelevance of the 'direction of time'; only thus he could call the present the 'end' of the future! In this way he missed the essential part of Kant's argument - the distinction between the potential infinity of the future contrasting with the actual infinity of the past, since for him, both are ontologically on the same level: in truth, according to him they are both equally actual in the Eleatic sense: His [Kant's] regarding the two as different in this respect illustrates just that kind of BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 389 slavery to time which, as we agreed in speaking of Parmenides, the true philosopher must learn to leave behind him.44 What is characteristic of Russell is that his thinking, despite its highly abstract character, is hopelessly tinged by visual elements. When he thinks of interval of time, he unwittingly sees in his imagination a geome• trical interval, that is, a straight segment bounded by two points; and since their order is spatial and completely devoid of succession, they both can be called 'ends'. But it would obviously be not only odd, but plainly incorrect to call the year 1872 the 'end' of Russell's life. Yet, this is what Russell really says when he calls the present 'the end ofthe future.' It is always the same old confusion of succession with its static geometrical symbol which Bergson never tired of criticizing. The same geometrical symbolism underlies another prejudice which has a direct bearing on the controversy between finitism and infinitism. It is clear that if time can be symbolized by a straight Euclidian line, it can be extended in either direction; from this the inconceivability of the finiteness of the past follows. Kant's first antithesis is precisely based on the inconceivability of the 'zero-time' or of The First Moment; for - Kant argues - if the universe began, then there must have been empty time before its beginning. (In truth, this is what Gassendi and Newton did believe, even though their original temporal void was only physically, not metaphysically empty, being filled by the divine everlastingness.) Augus• tine's rejoinder that the universe began with time, not in time, convinces only a few; yet, it remains unanswerable since within the framework of the relational theory of time (which is inseparable from finitism) it is meaningless to posit the temporal void prior to time. Yet, our unconscious• ly Newtonian view of time as a linear receptacle, unlimited in either direction and existing prior to any concrete events stubbornly resists rational argumentation. Even C. D. Broad's lucid restatement of the meaninglessness of the objections against the relational finitistic theory of time was strangely misunderstood as an attempt 'to block the way of possible inquiry,' 45 to wit, the inquiry into what was before the zero-time. Such misunderstanding of Broad's argument is based on a petitio principii; time is simply assumed to be infinite in the direction of the past and its limitation in this direction appears as impossible as any arbitrary bound• ary of Euclidian line. But probably the strongest motive behind the reluctance to admit the 390 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS possibility of the finite past is the apprehension that it will be interpreted in a theological sense. This was in a sense natural; for only too often has 'the beginning of the world' been interpreted as the decisive argument for its creation, especially in the English speaking world. We mentioned the names of B. Stewart, G. P. Tait, James Jeans, E. T. Whittaker and E. A. Milne. It is significant that pope Pius XII welcomed the evolutionary cosmology for the same reason: he regarded it as conclusive, scientific evidence for the theistic creation.46 On the other hand, it is only fair to see the other side of the coin. The antitheological prejudice was and is equally strong. It often lay behind the reluctance of the cosmogonists to extrapolate the validity of the law of entropy to the whole universe and it was certainly conspicuous in the thought of Hackel and Nietzsche; the universe must be eternal, - if we do not want to capitulate to theologians. Under such conditions the discussion clearly ceases to be dispassionate and fruitful. Fortunately, we now can hear an increasing number of voices insisting that this cosmological controversy should be separated from theological and religious issues. Jacques Merleau-Ponty pointed out that Eddington was always opposed to the theological interpretation of the initial state of the universe and that, more surprisingly, the same attitude was eventually adopted by Lemaitre. More recently, Ronald W. Hepburn denied that the finitistic cosmogony is theistic in its strict interpretation; the most it is entitled to assert is that the world 'just started to be'.47 Of course, finitism in cosmogony is compatible with theism, even though it does not imply it. But according to the old tradition going as far back as Origen, theism is equally compatible with the eternity of the universe - a clear indication that the question of the finiteness of the past can be dissociated from theology. This is virtually conceded even by Milne; while he equated 'zero-moment' with the act of creation, he stressed that this act itself is 'for ever invisible', 48 transcendent to our experience, since it is the event preceding all other events and in this sense 'prior to physics'. The last expression is that of Lemaitre who said that "physics begins with the multiplicity, and no physics is possible in the absolute simplicity of the primordial being (dans l'absolue simp/icite de /'etre initial). Now time is a mUltiple being." While Lemaitre interpreted this 'absolute simpli• city of the primordial being' in an Aristotelian-Thomistic sense, he, more cautious than Milne, regarded it as his own private interpretation and conceded to the materialist the freedom 'to deny any transcendent Being'. 49 BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 391

It is significant that, as already mentioned, the disbelief in the eternity of the past did not convert Eugen Diihring to theism and that Herbert Spen• cer labelled the doctrine of 'the universe creating itself' as pantheism. 50 All this indicated that the doctrine of the finite past should be con• sidered on its own merit and in comparison to its rival theory. Its oppo• nents must state their theory in a more satisfactory language; they must avoid the contradiction which they commit in saying that the infinite ordinal number - the last, roth term - is unattainable by its own nature and at the same time that it is being attained in every actual moment of the universe. They must realize that finitism is based on the relational theory of time which makes it invulnerable to any objection based on the absurdity of empty time, supposedly preceding the zero-moment. They must face the fact that certain questions are unanswerable because they are meaningless: it is probably meaningless to ask what is 'inside' the electron, especially if we interpret it, as Riemann and Weyl suggested, as a 'hole' in space; it is equally meaningless to ask what was 'before' time since the relation of 'before' is a temporal relation and cannot be applied outside of time. I fail to see any difference between this question and that which naively asks what is 'behind' the spherical or elliptical space. From the standpoint of the biological theory of knowledge the alleged logical necessity of actual infinity is a combined effect of macroscopic conditioning and of the illusion of spatialization: since physical space on the human level appears approximately very Euclidian, the second axiom of Euclid - the possibility of extending a straight line in either direction - is accepted by our imagination and extrapolated beyond any limit; and since time is customarily symbolized by an Euclidian line, the infinity of time appears to us as inevitable as the infinity of space. By extending such line from the 'now'-point 'backwards' indefinitely, we obtain the begin• ningless eternity; by extending it 'forwards', another illusion - very much discussed in this book - arises, the illusion of the ready made, prefabri• cated future, whose apparent 'becoming' is, in Griinbaum's words, merely 'coming into our awareness'. If we realize the limited empirical adequacy of the Euclidian geometry, and, in particular, if we become aware of the thorougly misleading character of all spatial symbols when they are ap• plied to time, both illusions are dissipated. It is true that 'the line being extended' conveys, despite its inherent limitations, the potential infinity or, rather indefiniteness of the future; for the successive character of our 392 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS operation of extending mirrors, so to speak, the successive character of reality itself; the fallacy of the pre-existing future arises only if we sub• stitute the already drawn line for the line in the process of being extended. But a backward extending of the line from the present to the past runs, so to speak, in the sense 'opposite' to that in which the present came into being and in this sense, it is doubly inadequate. In truth, considered psychologically, even this operation of 'backward extending' like any other mental operation is forward-going, 'future-oriented', and the 'infi• nity' of its future, is only potential, like the infinity of any other process. The idea of the elapsed eternity of time is thus nothing other than the potential infinity of our mental operation fictitiously projected into the past. Whether Bergson's commitment to finitism - which has been implicit rather than explicit - was related to his theism is uncertain. It is not im• possible, especially if the neo-criticism of Renouvier and Evellin had not been without influence on him; in their thought finitism and theism were associated very closely. On the other hand we must not forget that Berg• son used the theistic language for the first time only in Creative Evolution when he spoke of God 'as a center from which worlds spring' provided that this center is regarded not as a thing, but as a continuity of springing Uaillissement}. This language with its Plotinian overtones and by the usage of the present tense suggest the idea of continuous creation rather than a single act in the past. One has the same impression when reading Bergson's letter to Father Joseph de Tonquedec dated February 20. 1915; while he explicitly rejected monism and pantheism 51, his language again suggested a continuous divine creation and there was no reference to the primordial creative act of which he spoke in his conversation with Jacques Chevalier more than a decade before. Certainly, the final and more explicit stage of Bergson's theism in his Two Sources of Morality and Religion was hardly determined by his leanings toward finitism in his cosmogony. It is characteristic that in his brief restatement of the central ideas of Creative Evolution in 1932, Bergson failed even to mention entropy. 52 As far as the future of the universe and of evolution is concerned, Bergson's views do not seem to be unambiguous; but this is certainly due more to one central feature of Bergson's philosophy than to its own intrinsic ambiguity. This central idea is the open, indeterminate character BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 393 of the future: one might say that the ambiguity of the future is the least ambiguous idea of Bergson's thought. His rejection of both mechanism and finalism in Creative Evolution as well as his rejection of historical determinism in Two Sources were inspired by this conviction: that the future outcome of the cosmic history, including the history of the earth, of its life and of mankind itself is not preordained either in the mechanis• tic or in the theological sense. In the light of this central idea some apparent discrepancies in what may be called 'Bergson's eschatology' disappear. In the lyrical passage at the end of the third chapter of Creative Evolution Bergson in highly poetic terms describes life, 'vital impetus' as overcoming every obstacle, 'perhaps even death'.53 This has always been regarded as a sure indication of Bergson's optimism and as such it was welcomed, among others, by Bernard Shaw; it certainly stands in a stark contrast to the current twen• tieth century pessimism as it found its most eloquent expression in Rus• sell's gloomy vision of the hostile universe and of the ultimate doom of life in his Free Man's Worship. (This was written in 1903 when Russell still believed that man, "his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocation of atoms" 54; although he later, under the pressure of new facts, gave up his original Lucretian view, he retained his basically pessimistic outlook until his death.) Bergson himself in the passage, referred to above, admitted that his own doctrine 'does not only facilitate speculation; it gives also more power to act and to live." Yet, to call Bergson an 'optimist' is certainly an oversimplification. There are some lines in the very same chapter of Creative Evolution with a distinctly pessimistic overtone. In characterizing the ectropic (anti-en• tropic) nature of life, Bergson writes as follows:

It [i.e. life] has not the power to reverse the direction of physical changes, such as the principle of Carnot determines it. It does, however, behave absolutely as a force would have behaved which, left to itself, would work in the inverse direction. Incapable of stopping the course of material changes downwards, it succeeds in retarding it. The evolution of life really continues, as we have shown, an initial impulsion ... [which] has determined the development of the chlorophyllian function in the plant and of the sensory-motor system in the animal, brings life to more and more effcient acts by the fabrication and use of more and more powerful explosives. Now, what do these explo• sives represent if not a storing-up of the solar energy, the degradation of which energy is thus provisionally suspended on some of the points where it was being poured forth? The usable energy which the explosivie contains will be expended, of course, at the 394 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS moment of explosion; but it would have been expended sooner if an organism had not happened to be there to arrest its dissipation, in order to retain and to save it Up.55 Does not this then mean that the dissipation of energy will ultimately take place and will prevail over the 'ectropism' of life?56 And does not this contradict a biological overcoming of death, envisioned by Bergson? The only answer to this question, though not explicitly given is implicitly present in Bergson's philosophy, which certainly transcends the simplistic dichotomy 'optimism versus pessimism'. The first term usually suggests the inevitability of some metaphysical 'happy end', whether it is the inevitable victory of God, of Good or of Life. When he wrote that 'perhaps even death' will be overcome, the word 'perhaps' is crucial; it is one of the possibilities in the open future of mankind and of organic life, - not any necessity. In this respect Bergson's vision of 'creative evolution' differs essentially from the 'inevitable progress' of Spencer's mechanistic evolu• tionism and classical 'laissez-faire' liberalism. Bergson repeatedly warned against such illusions. He pointed out that in the evolutionary process "failure seems the rule, success exceptional and always imperfect". Even the exceptional success of evolution - the human species - does not have its future guaranteed and its progress assured; the last words of Two Sources of Morality and Religion, quoted in the last chapter of Part III, betray a great concern in this respect. The transition from the closed to the open society on which the future of mankind clearly depends, is not a historical necessity; there is still a terrifying possibility that mankind, split and fragmented into closed societies antagonistic to each other, may eventually destroy itself completely. But it is obvious that any fatalistic pessimism is equally incompatible with the philosophy of creative evolution. The extinction of human race as well as that of organic life on the earth is a possibility only, not a predetermined and unavoidable event. Furthermore, life is, according to Bergson, probably not confined to this planet and may exist in other solar systems "under forms of which we have no idea, in physical conditions to which it seems to us, from the point of view of our physiology, to be absolutely opposed".57 Under such conditions it is conceivable that the ultimate dissipation of energy may be not only delayed, but delayed inde• finitely. This would be in conformity with the statistical character of the law of entropy which was recognized even by classical physics; it would be rather odd if this statistical, i.e. non-necessitarian, character were not BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 395 recognized by modern physics which regards all macroscopic laws as merely statistical. It would have been equally odd for Bergson, opposing historical inevitability on either the planetary or cosmic scale, to ignore it. Furthermore, he explicitly raised the question whether we have the right "to extend to the entire universe considerations drawn from the present state of our solar system". 58 It is true that his questioning of the universal applicability of the law of dissipation of energy was based on considerations completely different from those which inspired Boltzmann. Boltzmann's doubts were inspired by his kinetic-corpuscular view of nature and by the reversibility of all mechanical processes. The only alter• native to the 'thermal death' of the universe was for him the everlasting cyclical process; for Bergson, it is an unlimited, irreversible evolution with possibilities of local regresses and even disasters, but with no necessity of final and ultimate death of life. In Bergson's broader metaphysical perspective the ultimate death of life is utterly inconceivable. Even if all its organic forms were destroyed, the physical events would remain - and let us remember, that these events are still proto-mental, i.e. proto-vital in their character. Further• more, the destruction of all organisms would mean only the destruction of all manifestations of life and not of the principle of life itself; this dis• tinction is essential for understanding Bergson's modified dualism. This point had been discussed in some chapters of Part III and in Appendix II; it would, certainly deserve a far more extensive discussion, at least as extensive as Bergson's theory of matter. But such discussion is clearly beyond the scope of this book.

NOTES

1 H. Bergson, Ecrils et Paroles, II, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1959, pp. 311-312. Meyerson dealt with the second law of thermodynamics in Chapter VIII of L'Identite et realiti; later (1921) in De I'explication dans les sciences, 1, pp. 198-210. 2 C.E., p. 265. 3 C.E., p. 21. 4 C.E., pp. 265-266. 5 Vorlesungen fiber die Gastheorie, Leipzig 1898, p. 256. In the English translation of Boltzmann's book (Lectures on the Gas Theory, transl. by Stephen C. Bush, Univ. of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964, p. 445), 'das Treibende' is translated rather misleadingly as 'goal'. 6 Svante Arrhenius, Worlds in the Making (transl. by H. Borns), Harper & Bros, New York, 1908, p. 209; L. Boltzmann, op. cit., pp. 256--258. 7 H. Poincare, Le{:ons sur les hypotheses cosmogoniques, Paris 1911, Ch. X, esp. p. 254. 396 BERGSON AND MODERN PHYSICS

8 C.E., p. 266. 9 W. Rankine, 'On the Reconcentration of the Mechanical Energy in the Universe', Phil. Mag. IV (1852) 358-360. 10 C.E., p. 267; Boltzmann, op. cit., p. 254; H. Reichenbach, The Direction o/Time, Univ. of California Press, Los Angeles, 1956, p. 111. 11 Boltzmann, op. cit., p. 257. 12 'Dber die Unentbehrlichkeit der Atomistik in der Naturwissenschaft', in Boltz• mann's Popu/iire Schri/ten, Leipzig 1905, pp. 141-157. 13 C.E., p. 267. 14 Jacques Chevalier, Entretiens avec Bergson, Paris 1959, pp. 5-6; R. Berthelot, Un romantisme utilitaire, II, Paris 1913, p. 241. 15 C.E., p. 338. 16 F. Evellin, L'Infini et quantite, Paris 1880, pp. 203-208. 17 J. Chevalier, op. cit., pp. 5-6. The term 'absolute beginning' as well as the insistence on the correlation between determinism and infinitism can be found in nearly all Renouvier's writings, including one of his last books Les dilemmes de la metaphysique pure, 2nd Ed., Paris 1927, esp. in Ch. IV and VI. 18 C.E., p. 267. 19 C.E., p. 262-263. 20 G. Lemaitre, The Primeval Atom. An Essay on Cosmology (trans!. by Betty, H. and Serge A. Korff, Van Nostrand, New York, 1950, pp. 13-15. 21 I. Kant, Critique 0/ Pure Reason (trans!. by Norman Kemp Smith), Macmillan, London, 1953, p. 396. 22 G. J. Whitrow, The Structure and Evolution 0/ the Universe. An Introduction to Cosmology, Harper & Bros, New York, 1959, pp. 103-104. Bergson could have used this reinstatement of absolute time as an argument for his temporalistic interpretation of space-time in his Duration and Simultaneity, but his lack of interest in general relativity prevented him from doing so. Cf. my article 'Bergson's Theory of Matter and Modem Physics', in Bergson and the Evolution 0/ Physics, (ed. and trans!. by P. A. Y. Gunter), Univ. of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1969, p. 315 note. 23 Lemaitre, op. cit., pp. 17f. 24 Lemaitre, ibid. pp. 18-19. 25 C.E., p. 223. 26 A. Calinon, 'Les espaces geometriques', Revue philosophique 27 (1889) 588-595. 27 See note 22. 28 C.E., p. 271. 29 Berthelot ridicules the 'pyrotechnics' of Bergson's metaphors in Creative Evolution (op. cit., II, p. 63). Cf. Russell's mockeries in his article 'The Philosophy of Bergson', The Monist 22 (1912) 333. 30 E. Mach, Die Principien der Wiirmelehre, 4th Ed., Leipzig 1923, p. 364. 31 R. Berthelot, Un romantisme utilitaire, II, p. 244. 32 L. Brunschwicg, La physique du XXe siecle et la philosophie, Paris 1936; H. Driesch, Relativitiitstheorie und Weltanschauung, Leipzig 1930; B. Blanshard, The Nature 0/ Thought, Allen & Unwin, London, 1939, pp. 392-393. In the meeting of Societe fran~ise de philosophie, 17 November, 1934 Rene Berthelot insisted that the impossi• bility to establish absolute simultaneity of distant events is merely technical and provisional, not intrinsic; the microphysical indeterminacy is, according to him, of the same kind. (Bulletin de la Societe /ran(:aise de philosophie, 34e annee No.5 (1934) 172-183.) EXTRACT FROM THE LETTER TO M. CAPEK

... II etait impossible de mieux comprendre l'essentiel de mes vues sur la duree et la matiere. En particulier, vous avez admirablement montre comment, dans quel sens et dans queUe mesure, la conception de la ma• tiere que j'ai de plus en plus precisee dans mes ouvrages successifs antici• pait sur les conclusions de la physique d'aujourd'hui. Ce point n'avait guere ete apercu, pour la raison tres simple que mes vues sur la question, emises a une epoque ou I'on considerait comme evident que les elements ultimes de la matiere doivent etre concus a l'image du tout, derouterent les lecteurs, et furent Ie plus souvent laissees de cote comme etant la partie incomprehensible de mon reuvre. lIs jugerent d'ailleurs, probable• ment, que c'en etait une partie accessoire. Aucun (sauf peut-etre, dans une certaine mesure, Ie profond mathematicien et philosophe Whitehead) ne s'est pas apercu comme vous qu'il y avait Ill. pour moi quelque chose d'essentiel, qui se rattachait etroitement a la theorie de la duree, et qui etait en meme temps dans la direction ou la physique s'engagerait tot ou tard ... Laissez-moi vous adresser, Monsieur, avec mes compliments et mes remerciements, l'assurance de mes sentiments bien sympathiques.

H. BERGSON INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

d'Abro, A. 231, 237, 217; his polemic Atomistic theory of time, its inadequacy, against Bergson, 238, 242-3, 246-7, 142, 199,205-7, 343 254-6,276 Atomists, Arabian, 158,228 Ach, N. 122, 358 Auditory qualities, 315 Action, its atomicity, 293-5. See also Auditory models, 313-330. See also Planck constant, Quantum theory Whitehead Aether41-2,45,229-30,239,264,279-80, Auditory space, 318-26. See also Straw- 305. See also Field son, P. F. Aiken, H. D. 4, 14 Auerbach, F. 397 Alpha Centauri 332 Augustine St. 104, 375, 395 Ampere, A. M. 51 d'Autrecourt, Nicolas Xl Anaxagoras 93 Avenarius, R. 7, 14, 60-1, 63. See also Andromeda nebula 332 empiriocriticism Antinomies, see Kant Axiom of free mobility, inapplicable to A priori, Spencer's view 11, 16; Helm• time, 203 holtz's physiological interpretation of, Ayer, A. J. 53, 56 16 Aristotle 31, 54, 104, 260, 346; on the Bachelard, G. 58, 63, 267, 269 immortality of the past, 153-4, 161, Bacon,F. XI 165; against void, 224; on change, 276, Bain, A. 210 369; on infinity, 385 Baumann,J. 183, 186 Aristotelian logic 74 Baudelaire, P. C. 86 Aristotelian metaphysics 317 Becoming, 79-80; its denials, 107, 109-10, Aristotelian physics 260 112, 388, 391; its objective status in the Arrhenius, Svante 371, 376, 395 physical world, 233-7; its irreversibili• Associationism, see Atomism, psycho- ty, 368-9; its pulsational character, logical 305. See also Duration, Novelty, Suc• Atomism, logical 76, 93, 126, 340, 346. cession See also B. Russell Becquerel, J., his discussion with Bergson, Atomism, psychogenesis of, see Piaget 247,255 Atomism, psychological,122-3, 146,219; Benda, J. XII criticized by Bergson, 92-7, 167, 191; Berdyaev,N. 62, 64 upheld by B. Russell, 123, 344 Bergson, Henri IX-XI; his biological Atomism, physical, 41-2, 93, 260, 273, theory of knowledge, XII, 3, 5, 7, 309. See also Democritus, Lucretius, 30-39, 44, 55, 63, 65-7, 69-74, 17-80, Gassendi, Dalton, Corpuscular-kinetic 83-4, 261-3, 268, 272, 282, 289, 333, models, Fallacy of simple location, 391-2; his relation to Bachelard and Particles Bridgman, 58; to empiriocriticism, BERGSON'S THOUGHTS ON ENTROPY AND COSMOGONY 397

33 Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, 4th ed., The Cambridge University Press, 1944, p. 278. 34 Op. cit., p. 281. 35 Jacques Merleau Ponty, Cosmologie du XXe siecle. Etude epistemologique et histo• rique des theories de la cosmologie contemporaine, Paris 1965, p. 353. 36 G. Gamow, 'Modem Cosmology', in Scientific American 190 (1954) 63. 37 Ch. Renouvier, Les dilemmes de la metaphysique pure, Paris 1927, p. 106. 38 Kant, op. cit., p. 398. 39 C. D. Broad, 'Kant's Mathematical Antinomies', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954-55), 7. 40 Louis Couturat, De l'infini mathematique, Paris 1896, p. 462. 41 Couturat, ibid., p. 463. 42 A. Griinbaum, Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1967, pp. 124-5. 43 B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Allen & Unwin, London, 1914, pp. 157, 179-180. 44 Russell, ibid., p. 180. 45 M. Munitz, The Mystery of Existence, Appleton-Century-Croft, New York, 1965, p.140. 46 E. L. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science, Longmans, Green & Co. London, 1956, pp. 149-153. Pius XII referred to E. T. Whittaker's book Space and Spirit. Theories of the Universe and the Arguments for the Existence of God, H. Regnery Co., Hinsdale, 1948. 47 Ronald Hepburn, 'Creation', in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan, New York, 1967, p. 255. 48 E. A. Milne, Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1952, pp. 76--77. On Milne, cf. R. S. Cohen, 'E. A. Milne's Theory of Relativ• ity, A Critical Study', The Review of Metaphysics 3 (1949-50) 385-405. 49 Quoted by Merleau Ponty, op. cit., p. 333; 344. 50 H. Spencer, First Principles, 4th ed., Appleton, New York, 1896, p. 33. On Diihring, cf. H. Bois, 'Le finitisme de Diihring', L'annee philosophique XX (1910) 93-124. 51 H. Bergson, Bcrits et Paroles, II, p. 365. On the other hand, in his previous letter to the same person May 12, 1908 Bergson stressed that his criticism of the concept of nothingness does not mean that the universe is eternal (ibid., p. 296). Since, however, even Chevalier conceded (loc. cit., p. 5) that Bergson in 1901 did not express himself dogmatically about the problem of the origin of the universe, the most appropriate characterization of his views would be as "cautious leaning toward finitism". 52 Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris 1932, Ch. II, pp. 116--122. 53 C.E., p. 295. 54 Mysticism and Logic, Longmans, Green & Co., 1919, p. 47. 55 C.E., p. 268. 56 The term 'ectropism' was coined by the physicist Felix Auerbach in his book Ektropism oder die physikalische Theorie des Lebens, Jena 1910. 57 C.£., p. 279. 58 C.E., p. 269, note. ADDITIONAL SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

PART I Biological approach to epistemology is also present in the following writings: W. James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. II, Ch. XXVIII 'Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience' ; A. Fouille, 'Les origines de notre structure intellectuelle et cerebrale', Revue philosophique XXXII (1892) 433-66, 570-602; Georg Simmel, GOber eine Beziehung der Se• lectionslehre zur Erkenntnistheorie', Archiv fur systematische Philosophie L (1895) 34-45; O. Wiener, Die Erweiterung unserer Sinne, Leipzig 1900; J. M. Baldwin, Darwin and Humanities, Allen and Unwin, London 1910, esp. Ch. IV 'Darwinism and Logic'; Henri Pieron, La sensation, guide de vie, Paris 1945; Louis Rougier, Traite de la connaissance, Paris 1955, esp. Ch. XXV 'La nouvelle theorie de la connaissance'; Donald T. Campbell, 'Evolutionary Epistemology', to be published in The Philosophy of Karl R. Popper in The Library of Living Philosophers (ed. by Paul A. Schilpp), The Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, Illinois. This article contains a very extensive bibliography.

PART II The bibliography of the books and articles dealing with Bergson's thought is enormous; that contained in Rose-Marie Mosse-Bastide's Bergson edu• cateur(Paris 1955) extends until 1952; that given by G. Mourelos, Bergson et les niveaux de realite (Paris 1964) until 1961. Among the older books the significance of A. Bazaillas' La vie personnelle. Etude sur quelques illusions de la perception interieure (Paris 1904) is still recognized, par example by V. Jankelevitch, Henri Bergson (Paris 1959) p. 40; for it disposed of the still current myth of 'amorphous continuity' of Bergsonian duree. This alleged amorphousness was the target of both Lovejoy and Ushenko and in France of Gaston Bachelard in his La dialectique de la duree (Paris 1936). Another older book significant within the context of ADDITIONAL SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 399 this study is Frank Grandjean, La raison et la vue (Paris 1920) dealing even more systematically than Bergson with the distorting influence of visual and spatial imagery. Leon Husson's L'intellectualisme de Bergson (Paris 1947) is even by its own title opposed to the persistent misrepre• sentation of Bergson as an irrationalist. Two more recent studies on Bergson's style are: E. Brehier, 'Images plotiniennes, images bergsonien• nes', in Les Etudes bergsoniennes n (1949) 107-28; and L. Adolphe, La dialectique des images chez Bergson, Paris 1951. On the relation of Bergson to Whitehead, cf. P. Devaux, 'Le bergsonisme de Whitehead', in Revue internationale de philosophie 56-57 (1961) 217-36; F. Cesselin, La philo• sophie organique de Whitehead (Paris 1950). Concerning the perception of time and epistemological problems involved in it, The Problem of Time (University of California Publications in Philosophy, vol. 18, 1935) re• mains valuable while P. Fraisse's The Psychology of Time (Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., London, 1964) combines both a psychological and philosophical approach and contains a very extensive bibliography. Cf. also The Voices of Time (ed. by J. T. Fraser) Brazillach, New York 1966, Part I and II, in particular the articles of C. Benjamin, F. KummeI, W. Durr, J. Piaget, M.-L. Franz and J. Cohen. On the difficult problem of the status of the past see P. Weiss, 'The Past: its Nature and Reality', The Review of Metaphysics, V (1952-3) 507-22; Ch. Hartshorne, 'The Immortality of the Past: Critique of Prevalent Misconceptions' (the Re• view of Metaphysics vn (1954-5) 92-112) and Weiss' rejoinder, 'The Past: Some recent Discussions', ibid., pp. 299-306. Bergson's view that rigorous determinism eliminates time and change entirely was shared among American philosophers by F. J. E. Woodbridge in his Nature and Mind (Columbia University Press, 1937, p. 52).

PART III The main reason why Bergson's philosophY of physics was either ignored or completely misunderstood was - besides the influence of classical physics - the fact that the development of his thought was not taken into account. The difference between the first phase in which the physical world was still regarded as timeless and the second phase when becoming was reinstated even in the realm of matter was simply ignored. Only thus could S. Radhakrishnan claim that "Bergson's account of matter is rid• dled with inconsistencies and contradictions" (The Mind 26 (1917) 329). 400 ADDITIONAL SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A similar view was upheld as late as in 1941 by Dominique Parodi ('La duree et la matiere chez Bergson', Revue de metaphysique et de morale 48). Only after the Second World War the studies dealing more attentively with this aspect of Bergson's thought began to appear: V. Mathieu, 'II tempo ritrovato. Bergson e Einstein', Filosofia IV (1953) and 'Scienza e metafisica in Bergson', Giornale di metafisica XIV (1959); L. Adolphe, L'univers bergsonien (Paris 1955) and 'Bergson et la science d'aujour• d'hui', Etudes philosophiques 19 (1959); F. Heidsieck, Henri Bergson et la notion d'espace (Paris 1957) dealing with the topic which previously had been discussed only by Wilko Emmens (Das Raumproblem bei H. Bergson, Leiden 1931); finally, the papers and discussions at Congres Bergson at Paris, 1959 by M. Ambacher, M. Capek, O. Costa de Beau• regard, I. Dambska, A. Kremer-Marietti M. Matchinski, A. Mercier and A. Metz. The three studies dealing with Bergson's criticism of Einstein by G. Pflug, J. F. Busch and W. Berteval together with the lively dis• cussion between Bergson and A. Metz were recently translated and in• cluded in the book Bergson and the Evolution of Physics (ed. by P. A. Y. Gunter), University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1969. This collection contains also besides three essays referred to in this book (that of L. de Broglie, of R. Blanche and my own), also the translations of two articles of o. Costa de Beauregard and one of S. Watanabe as well as the dis• cussion by Vere C. Chapell and D. Sipfle of Bergson's treatment of Zeno's paradoxes. Appendix II. Cf. Henry Margenau's recent article 'Quantum Mecha• nics, Free Will and Determinism', Journal ofPhilosophy 64 (1967) 714--25; and my article, 'The Main Difficulties of the Identity Theory', Scientia 104 (1969) 1-17. Appendix III. It is worth mentioning that A. N. Whitehead came closest to the Bergsonian polarity of ectropism-entropy in the concluding pages of The Function of Reason (Princeton University Press, 1929). Cf. also Introductory Summary of the same book. INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS 403

60--1 ; to Reichenbach, 65-7; to Piaget, 347-8,350-1,356,358-65; his thoughts 67-71 ; on the logic of solid bodies, 56, on entropy and cosmogony, 368-75, 69, 72-4, 336; his intuition, 59, 86-91; 379-82; his finitism, 373-5, 385, 392; on the inadequacy of mechanistic on the future of life, 392-3 models, 62, 273-4, on the fallacy of Bergsonism, literary, IX-X, 58 spatialization, 85, 129, 136-7,251; criti• Berigard, Claude 93 cizes psychological atomism, 92-7; links Berkeley, G. 84 succession with novelty, 99-101, 104, Bernoulli,J.387-8 107-9, 111-12, 116-17; on the struc• Berthelot, Marcellin,9, 11, 14 ture of psychological duration, 116-121, Berthelot, Rene, criticizes Poincare, 22, 124-31; denies durationless instants, 26,28; criticizes Bergson, IX, XI-XII, 134-7, 139; his relation to Weyl, 140; 180--1, 185, 192, 194, 202, 204-5, 237, rejects the atomistic theory of time, 273,277,279,283,287-8,291,373; on 142, 144-5; on the unity and multipli• the difference between Nietzsche and city of duration, 147-150; his relation Bergson, 80; his negative attitude to• to Brouwer, 150, 180, 183-5; on the ward modern physics, 231, 382, 396 status of the past, 152-165; commented Bessel, F. W. XI on by Royce, 165-7; by Ingarden, Beth,E. W. 163, 183, 186 167-72; by Croce, 172-3; rejects nomi• Bifurcation of nature, 311, 359 nalism, 174-5; his philosophy of math• Birtwistle, G. 267 ematics, 176-185; on duration In the Black, M. 186 physical world, 189-193, 195; on differ• Blanche, R. 179,185,327 ent temporal spans, 196, 198-206, Blanshard, B. 217,299,301,382,396 214-19,223,249-50,289-90,294,360; Boethius 385 on psychological extension, 208-12; on Bohm, D. XII, 175, 246, 249, 255-6, degrees of spatiality and their relation 297-8, 301, 308-9, 312, 328, 330, 354, to differences in temporal span, 218- 364 222; denies instantaneous space, 224-5, Bohr,N. 266, 268,296, 346,365 234-5; his view on the relativity theory, Bois, H. 397 236-256; his agreement with Einstein, Boltzmann, L. 266, 371-3, 382, 395-6 236-8; his correct insights, 239-44; his Borel, E. 350, 384 errors and inconsistencies, 244-52; on Born,M. 240, 242, 255, 296 matter as 'extensive becoming', 212, Boscovich, R. 51 231, 235, 255, 326; criticizes corpus• Boutroux, E., his contingentism, 25-5, cular-kinetic models, 257, 259-62, 113-14, 117, 299, 356; anticipates 268-71 ; on the substantiality of change, microphysical indeterminacy, 286-7, 273-76; ignores contemporary inde• 290; his relation to Bergson, XII, 291; pendence, 278-9, 282; evaluation by opposed to bifurcation of nature, Louis de Broglie, 292, 294-6; upholds 310--11 microphysical indeterminacy, 283-291, Bouvier, R. 28 299-301 ; similarity to Whitehead's and Bradley, F. H. 111, 159 Bohm's views, 303-12; on primary and Bridgman, P. W. 58, 63, 276-7 secondary qualities, 313-14; his use of Broad, C. D., on the reality of the past, auditory metaphors, 316-18, 326, 154, 161; on Kant's first antinomy, 386, 328-9; rejects Heraclitus, 329; his 389,391 world contrasted with the world of Broglie, de, Louis X, XII, 49, 54, 328, Laplace, 331-3; his relation to Russell, 383; discovers the undulatory nature 335-345; on the relation of microphys• of matter, 47, 267; on Bergson's anti• ical indeterminacy to life and freedom, cipations, 288, 291-6; returns to de- 404 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

terminism, 296-301 Consciousness, its causal efficacy, denied Brouwer, L. E. W., his neo-intuitionism, by the double aspect theory, 349-50; 150-1, 159, 183--6 affirmed by James, 349, 354, 366; by Brownian motion, 272 Bergson, 358--62; by Peirce, 350-1 Bruno, G. XI, 104, 384 Conservation laws, 68-9, 258-9, 264-5, BUnning, E. 351-3, 366 271, 315. See also Energy, Matter Burloud, A. 217, 222 Contemporary independence, see Causal Burnet, J. 75, 80 independence Contingency, see Indeterminacy Caiinon, A. 209, 213, 296, 380 Contingentism, see Boutroux, Tychism, Cantor, G. 51, 75, 186, 312, 386-7 Peirce Capek, M. 50, 105, 125, 169, 186, 201, Continuity of Duration, see Duration 225, 236, 268, 277 Continuity, mathematical, its contrast to Camap, R. 228, 236, 326 psychological continuity, 139-141; its Camot's principle, see Entropy inapplicability to microphysics, 310-11, Carr, H. W. 63, 181 332 Cartesian dualism, 30, 193, 351, 358-9 Conventionalism, see Poincare Cartesian (Cartesian-Kelvinian) models Comford, F. M. 32 of matter, 296-7, 305 Corpuscular-kinetic models, 257-267, Cartesian myths, 208, 325 373, 381-2 Cartesian res cogitans, 92, 122 Costa de Beauregard, O. 256 Cassirer, E. 45, 56, 105 Couturat, L. 75, 80, 386-388, 397 Cauchy, A. M. 51 Croce, B. 130-32, 170; on the relation of Causal (contemporary), independence, Bergson to Hegel, 172-3 replaces the classical concept of simul• Cuenot, L. 346, 365 taneity, 248-9, 279, 281-3 Causality, the views of R. Mayer, 12,20; Dalton, J. 51, 93 of Helmholtz, 12, 17-18; of Mach, Darwin, Ch. 4, 9, 13, 16 19-20; of Laplace, 17, 101-2, 114; de Davisson and Germer, 47 Broglie and Bergson's generalization of, Dematerialization, see Particles 293-4. See also Determinism, Indeter• Democritus XI, 19, 41, 51, 76, 85-5, 93. mination, Heisenberg's Principle of in• 110, 122, 221, 266 determinacy, Equivalence of Cause and Democritian void, 234, 264, 313 Effect Descartes, Rene XI, 7,47, 51-2, 84, 158, Cavendish, H. 263 182,189-90,212,224,228,259,279-81. Chaix-Ruy, J. 131 297, 328,351, 365 Change, reducible to displacement in Determinism, classical, in Helmholtz, 17; classical physics, 99-100, 258-9, 271-2, Mach, 20; Poincare, 25-7; Spinoza, 13, 315; without vehicle and container in 19, 110-11; Laplace, 107-9; Kant, modem physics, 268, 270-7, 305 101-2; Hegel, 102; incompatible with Chevalier, J. 345, 373-4, 396-7 succession according to Bergson, 106- Chrono-geometrical relations, 332 11; compatible, according to R. B. Chronon, see Atomistic theory of time Perry, 101; and according to Leibniz Clifford, W. K. 276-7 and Fouille, 113-15; questioned in Cliffordian 'humps', 297 microphysics, 284-296. See also Cau• Cohen, R. S. 397 sality, Indetermination, Novelty, Free• Compton, A. 373 dom Comte, A. 12-13 Deterministic aspect of Hfe, 363, 366-7 Condillac, E. B. 90, 92, 122,219 Dewey, John 7,18,31,55,57,160,162-3, INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS 405

313, 329, 365, 367 determinism, 99-112, 221, 223, 251, Dingle, H. 241, 249, 255-6 259 Dirac, P. A. M. 49 Elsasser, W. 346-7, 357-9, 362, 365-7 Double Aspect Theory, 13, 349-50; in Elsewhere, 233, 235, 253 P. Jordan, 355; its difficulty, 356-7 Empedocles, 93 Driesch, H., upholds strict determinism, Empiriocriticism, 14, 60-2 109, 112; opposed to modem physics, Energy, its substantialization by Spencer, 231,237-8, 382; his neo-Cartesianism, 12; its conservation, 12-13, 17-18,20, 362, 364-6 258; its generalization in the relativity Droscher, V. B. 39, 324, 330 theory, 265-6; Boutroux's and Berg• Du Bois-Reymond, P. 183, 186 son's early doubts about its absolute Dugas, R. 255 constancy, 286, 347 Diihring, E., his finitism, 374, 376, 391, Entropy, the law of, Meyerson and Berg• 397 son on its significance, 368; its relation Dunkirk 34 to irreversibility of becoming, 369-73; Duration, its qualitative continuity, 92-8; its original corpuscular-kinetic model, its incompleteness, 99-105; its hetero• 373; its more general interpretation, geneity, 118-132; not mathematically 382-3; its applicability to the universe, continuous, 133-41; not discrete either, 395; - and life, 348, 393-4 142-46; its qualitative multiplicity, Epicurus, 93, 369 147-51; misunderstood by Lovejoy Equivalence of cause and effect, ener• and Ushenko, 118-123; as concrete getically interpreted by classical phys• universal, 170-75; its reality in the icists and philosophers, 12-13; by physical world, 189-91, 195-6; its dif• Spencer and Helmholtz, 17-18; implies ferent rhythms, 199-201; its pulsation• identity in time, 221, 223 al character, 205-7; distension of, Equivalence principle, 246, 262 217-225. See also Novelty, Past, Suc• Eternity of the universe, the problem of, cession 373-391. See also Finitism, Infinity, Past Euclidian geometry, 10-11, 16, 17,21-2, Eddington, A. S. 230, 236, 250, 254, 268, 26-7, 51-2, 78-9 356, 363-4, 367 Euclidian space, 24, 51-2, 203, 212, 224, Ehrenfels, Ch. 145, 147 257,270, 321-2, 376, 391 Einstein, A. 16, 18, 26, 28, 54, 256, 280, Euclidian subconscious, 49, 58. See also 283; on aether, 42-3,45; praises Meyer• Newton-Euclidian subconscious son, 52, 56; admires Spinoza, 52; elimi• Euler's diagrams, 74 nates instantaneous space and simul• Evellin, F. 374, 385, 392, 397 taneity, 230-2, 235-8; his reinterpre• Events, matter constituted by, see Vibra- tation of Lorentz's contraction, 241; tory Theory of Matter on Langevin's paradox of twins, 246, Event-Particles, 267-8 255; his equation, 263-5, 378, 383; on Everywhere-Now, 226-231, 331 unitary field theories, 280, 283, 297-8; Extension, psychological, different from upholds microphysical determinism, geometrical space, 209-12; its different 297, 299; his interest in Bergson, 300; degrees, 212, 214f., 314 his cylindrical model of the universe, Extensive Becoming, 212; its similarity 377-8 with the relativistic time-space, 231, Eleatism, Eleatic tradition, 72, 104, 119, 235, 252, 326, 372 126, 130, 259, 368 Extensive character of sensations, 209-12, Elimination of time, inherent in classical 319 406 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

Fallacy of Simple Location, 266, 276-83, Griinbaum, A. 28, 112, 388, 391, 397 307, 343; its criticism anticipated by Gurwitch, A. 100, 185 Bergson, 263. See also Whitehead Guye, Ch. E. 288, 291 Faraday, M. 263, 280 Faraday's Laws, in electrochemistry, 15 Hackel, E. 11, 376 Fichte, J. G. 102, 105 Hadamard, J. 286 Field, its relation to particles, 279-82 Hamilton, William 102, 105 Field Theories, its deterministic charac- Hamilton, William Rowan 177, 186 ter,283 Hartshorne, C. 161 Finitism, 43,378-83,385,391-2. See also Hegel, G. W. 52, 149, 172,215 Eternity, Infinity, Kant's First Antino• Hegelian identity-in-diversity, 344 my Hegelianism 73,103,111 Finkelstein, D. 78, 80 Heidegger, M. 215 Finkelnburg, W. 71 Heisenberg, W. 49, 296, 301, 350 France,A. 103, 105 Heisenberg's Indeterminacy Principle, Fraenkel, A. 80, 186 XII, 267, 284-5, 293, 295, 305, 310, 318. Frank Philipp, on Mach's influence on See also, Indeterminacy, microphysical Einstein, 28; on the principle of inde• Helmholtz, H. XII, 15, 16-19, 24-7, terminacy, 267, 269; his criticism of 29-30, 32-3, 69, 186, 315 Pascual Jordan, 351, 354, 366 Hepburn, R. 390, 397 Freedom, the views of Bergson, 100,283, Heraclitus 72, 149, 158, 267, 275-6, 369 358-9,364-5; of Kant, 101-4; of Bohr, Heraclitean flux, different from 'duroo 346; of James, 349-50; of Nietzsche, roolle', 159, 329 350; of Peirce, 350; of Dewey, 365; Heraclitean 'Logos', 168 confused by Jordan with microphysical Herbart, J. F. 76, 92-3, 274 indeterminacy, 355-6 Heredity of Acquired Characteristics, 70 Frege, G. 53 Here-Now, 235, 252 Fresnel, A. 47 Heterogeneity of Duration, see Duration, Frisch, D. 268 Multiplicity, qualitative Frisch, von K. 37, 39, 71 Hilbert, D. 311 Fouille, A. 113-15, 117 Hobbes, Th. 279, 297 Four-dimensional world process, see Holderlin, J. Ch. 225 World process, four-dimensional Holt, E. B. 97 Holton, G., on the relation of Einstein to Galilei, Galileo 9, 104,235-6 Mach, 28 Galileo's Transformation, 235 Homo faber, 69-70, 364 Gamow, G. 43, 385, 397 Hoyle, F. 43, 384 Gassendi, P., his atomism, 51, 93; on ab• Hume, D. 12, 15, 23, 90, 92-3, 122-3, solute space, 224-5; upholds absolute 125, 149, 219, 274, 277, 344 simultaneity, 227, 236; affirms absolute Humphrey, G. 222 beginningless time, 370, 377, 389 HusserI, E. 53, 128, 131; his relation to Gestalt psychology, 219 Bergson, 172, 180 GOdel, K. 259 Huygens, Ch. 12, 47, 264, 269 Gonseth, F. 78, 80, 377 Goethe, J. W. 9 Ideal genesis of matter, in Bergson, Gold, T. 384 215-222 Gravitation, 26-7, 246-7, 262-4. See also Imageless thought, 56, 122, 145, 168, 173, Equivalence Principle, Relativity 210,216-17,389-9 Griffin, D. R. 324, 330 Immediacy, its meaning in Bergson, 86f. INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS 407

See also Intuition durationless instants, 133, 137-40; his Impenetrability, 84, 315 views compared to those of Bergson, Indeterminacy, in microphysics, 192, 155, 157-9, 161-3, 279, 282, 289; his 284-91, 332. See also Heisenberg's radical empiricism, 193; Russell's a• principle greement with, 342-3; on the extensive Indeterminism, relative in Bergson, 100, character of sensations, 209, 213, 319, 116. See also Novelty 322; on the experience of transition, Indivisibility of duration, 126-132; con• 121-2, 216, 222; on causal efficacy of fused with homogeneity by Lovejoy consciousness, 349, 354, 366 and Ushenko, 129; as a clue to the Jammer, M. 225 solution of Zeno's paradoxes, accord• Jankelevitch, V. 61, 63, 88, 112, 140, ing to Bergson, 337-8. See also Love• 145-6, 152, 175, 222 joy, Ushenko, Zeno, Russell Jeans, J., Sir 259, 376, 384, 390, 397 Inertial mass, its relational character, 265 Jordan,P. 288, 346-8, 351-59, 363-3, Infinite divisibility, see Continuity, math• 365. See also Freedom, Indeterminacy ematical Jupiter 35, 227 Infinity, Actual, 384-392. See also Eter• J uvet, G. 62, 64 nity, Past Juxtaposition, and logical distinction, 74; Infinity, Potential, 385. See also Finitism and counting, 178f.; as the ideal limit Ingarden, R., his comment on Bergson, of distended duration, 223-225; synon• 64, 164, 168-9; on the relation of ymous with the simultaneity of distant Husserl to Bergson, 170-2 events, 233; relativization of, 232-3, Instantaneous Actions, physically unreal, 236. See also Space, instantaneous, 231-6, 309 World-wide instant Instantaneous space, see Space instan• taneous Kant, I. 10-12, 16, 28, 43, 52-3, 58, 66, Instants, unreal in psychology, 131, 133- 84, 101-2, 104, 135-6, 157, 167, 177, 141, 147, 157, 163; upheld by C. A. 319, 322, 375-7, 385-9, 369-7 Strong and Meinong, 156; unreal phys• Kant's first antinomy, 376-7; linked by ically, 192, 310, 317-18 Renouvier and Bergson with the third Intuition, its active, voluntary character, antinomy, 374; Russell's comment on, 58-61, 86-88; its content, 80, 89-91; 388-9; Broad's comment on, 386, 389 Whitehead on, 144; different from in• Kelvin, Lord (William Thomson) 16,229, stinct, 312, 335. Its imageless charac• 279, 297, 328 ter, 328, see also Duration Kelvinian models, see Cartesian-Kelvini- Intuitionism, in mathematics, 150-1. See an models also Brouwer, L. E. W. Kerr cell, 201 Intuitive models, see Mechanical models, Koffka, K. 145-6,296 Pictorial models Kronecker, L. 75 Irreversibility of duration, 164-69. See Koyre, A. 224-5 also Becoming, Entropy Killpe, O. 112

James, W., criticizes Spencer, 32, 39; Lagrange,J. L. 225,236 criticizes psychological atomism, 95-6, Lalande, A. 59 130-31, 167; inadvertently uses Lamarck, J. B. de 70 atomistic language, 145-6; discovers Lamettrie, J. 354 imageless thought, 121-2, 125, 168; re• Land, J. P. N. 28 jects the bloc universe, 108, 110-12; on Lange, F. A. 183, 186 novelty, 174-5; on the unreality of Langevin, P. 233, 236, 245-9, 255, 279, 408 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

283 sition, experience of Langevin's paradox of the twins, 245-249 Lowe, V. 311 Laplace, P. S. de, his determinism, 17, 19, Lucretius 77, 93, 266, 272-3, 315, 330 101-2, 104-5, 107-109, 111, 114, 148, Lyell, Ch. 13 192, 221, 292-3, 298, 351, 354 Laplace, the world of, its relation to the Mach, E., opposed to mechanistic models, world of Bergson, 193, 223, 331-3, 350 X, 41,381-2,396; his biological theory Larmor, J. Sir 225 of knowledge, XII, 7, 9, 15, 18-21, Lasswitz, K. 97 27-8, 30, 32-33; his empiriocriticism, Lavalette, A. M. de 219 60-1; attacked by Lenin, 14; his psych• Leclerc, I., on Strawson, 329 ological atomism, 76, 90, 92-3, 123, Leeuwenhoek, A. van 40 274; on psychological extension, 319, Leibniz, G. W. XII, 12, 30, 51, 93, 102, 321, 330 105, 114-17, 137-8, 158, 161,216,222, Mackay,I>.S.146 264,268,276-8,282,303,309,367 Machrochronic perspective, 257, 294, Lemaitre, G., his cosmogony, 43, 377-81, 302,331 383, 390, 396 Macroscopic imagery, its persistent influ• Lenin, V. I. 14 ence, 48-50. See also Mechanistic Lenzen, V. 27-28 models, Pictorial models Lequier, J. 114 Macroscopic matter, see Middle dimen• Le Roy, E. 279, 283, 299,301,331,334 sions, the world of Le Sage, G. L. 264 Macroscopic perspective 257, 288, 302, Leucippus 75 331 Leverrier, U. J. J. 26 Maeterlinck, M. 225 Levi, R. 198, 201 Magnan, A. 201 Lie, S. 183 Mandler, G. 222 Lillie, R. 361-3, 366-7 Mandler, J. M. 222 Lindeman, F. A. 310, 312 Many-oneness, Brouwer's term for the Lipps, Th. 124 basal intuition of time, 159 Lobatchevski, N. 1.22,52,62 Marat, J. P. 115 Locke,J. 16,49,53 March, F. 71, 205 Lodge, O. 225 Margenau, H. 28; on the atomistic theory Logic of solid bodies, 56, 69, 72-4, 77, 308 of time, 207 Lorentz, H. 41, 72, 241, 299 Maritain, J. 238 Lorentz transformation, 235, 244, 246, Marxism 14 252 Mascall, E. L. 377 Lotze, H. 104, 163,210 Mass, see Inertia, Gravitation, Conserva- Lovejoy, A. 0., criticizes Bergson, 119, tion laws, Particles 121, 123, 129, 131, 146, 171, 173, 316, Materialism, 13-14, 85, 225, 301, 313, 317 328; upholds a 'segmental' theory of Materialization, see Particles time, 144, 157-8, 162-3; criticizes Matter, its undulatory character, 47, 267, Langevin's thought experiment, 245, 304-5,326-7; as constituted by events, 255; denies novelty in the physical 198, 267-8, 304-7, 327, 331, 342 world, 273-4. See also Lovejoy-Ushen• Mattise, G. 207 ko's objections; Atomistic Theory of Maury, A. 219 Time Maxwell, J. C. 225, 264, 280-1 Lovejoy-Ushenko's objections, 118-125; McElroy, H. C. 345 Bergson's answer, 129; Lovejoy's re• Mechanical models, their inapplicability joinder, 144. See also Ushenko, Tran- to microcosmos, 42-3; to megacosmos, INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS 409

43-4; criticized by Bergson, 61-2. See Mitchell, A., the translator of Creative also Corpuscular-kinetic models Evolution Mechanistic world view 5, 10, 13. See Mnemic span, see Temporal span also Determinism, Double-aspect the• More, H. 224-5 ory, Materialism MUller, A. 230, 236 Meinong, A. 156-8, 163 Multiplicity, arithmetical, inapplicable to Melody, consciousness of, 118-19, 144-5, duration, 96-7; in counting, 179 316-18. See also Auditory models Multiplicity, qualitative, 118-131; its Memory, elementary, as present in the imageless character, 118, 328. See also physical world, according to Bergson, Duration 215-16, 303; the same view of White• Munitz, M. 397 head, 303 Murphy, A. E. 125 Memory, psychological, see Duration, Instants, Past Natural selection, 346 Mendeleev, D. I. 42 Neo-Darwinians, 71,356 Menger, K. 311 Neo-Eleatism, 388 Mens momentanea sive carens recordatio• Neo-Kantians, 25, 52, 75, 103 ne, Leibniz's early definition of matter, Neorealists 55, 313, 315 216 Newton, I. 19,47, 54, 103-4, 224-5, 227, Merleau-Ponty, J., on Einstein's mass• 230,233,235-6,239,264,277,326,370, energy equation, 383, 397; on Lemaitre, 376-7, 379, 389 390, 397 Newtonian-Euclidian form of intellect, 3, Messer, A. 122 11, 30-1,55-6, 58-9, 307 Metaphors, their inadequacy according Newtonian mechanics, 10-11,26-7,78-9, to Bergson, 328 258, 351 Metz, A., his dispute with Bergson on re• Newtonian absolute space, 233, 235, 239, lativity, 246-7, 256; on Bergson and 250-1,257-8, 331 Meyerson, 112 Newtonian (Newtonian-Euclidian) sub- Meyer, E. von 50 conscious, 49, 230 Meyerson, E., on elimination of time, 73, Newtonian absolute time, 227, 377, 389 108, 112, 221; praised by Einstein, 52; Neptune 332 by Bergson, 112, 368, 395; by Louis de Neumann, C. 240 Broglie, 294, 300; on realism among Neurath, 0.351-2 physicists, 299 Nietzsche, F. 35, 39, 72. 79-80, 166, 350, Michelson's experiment, XI. 42-3,47,61, 366, 370, 376, 390 230 Noel, G. 183, 186 Microcosmos, 35, 39,42-3,333; as micro• Nominalism, rejected by Bergson, 174 chronos, 197-201 Non-Euclidian spaces, non-Euclidian geo- Middle Dimensions, the World of, 39, metries, 17, 22-25, 261, 280, 376-81, 48,65f 384. See also Euclidian space. Lobat• MiIl, J. S. 12,23, 53, 122, 330 chevski, Riemann, Space curvature MiIlikan. R. A. 42 Novelty, its elimination in determinism, Milne, E. A. 376, 384, 390, 397 99-105; inherent in succession, 107, Milne, L. and G. 39 116-17, 165-6, 169, 174; inseparable Minkowski's space-time, 226; its static from the persistence of the past, 127, misinterpretation, 251-2 220; its reality in the physical world, Minkowski's formula for the constancy 192, 358, 361. See also Freedom, Inde• of the world interval, its consequences, terminacy, Succession 233 Number, Bergson's analysis of, 176-180; 410 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

unfairness of Russell's criticism, 180--1. Petzoldt, J. 28 See also Multiplicity, arithmetical, Phenomenalism 12, 296, 299, 301 Bergson's Philosophy of Mathematics, Piaget, J., XII; his genetic epistemology, Brouwer, Russell 65, 67-71, 74, 163, 320; on psycho• genesis of atomism, 68-70, 260, 268, Oakeley, H. S. 154, 161 315; on his relation to Bergson, 70--71; Object, the idea of, investigated by Piaget, his influence on E. W. Beth, 183, 186 67-70; Quine's view, 77-78; Strawson's Pictorial models, their failure in physics, view, 319-321; a mere macroscopic 49-50, 52 prejudice, according to Gonseth, 78. Pieron, H. 38-39 See also Logic of Solid Bodies Pius XII 390 Organic view of nature, see Protomental Planck, M. 292,299, 378 entities, Bohm, Whitehead Planck's constant, 284, 290, 295. See also Organisms, as amplifiers of microphysical Action, its atomicity; Quantum theory indetermination, 346-350, 357. See also Planck's equation, 378 Consciousness, its causal efficacy; Plato, 51, 56, 60, 73, 104, 336 Jordan, P., Elsasser, W. Platt, J. R. 357, 366 Origen 390 Poincare, H. XII, 52, 56, 108, 183, 186; Ostwald, W. 14, 21, 271, 277, 382 his biological theory of knowledge, 15, 21-30,70; on the spurious character of Panmathematism, its historical roots, mathematical continuity, 75, 139; sug• 51-2; its limitations, 54-6 gests the atomicity of time, 198, 201, Panspychism, see Protomental entities 205; on measurement of time, 203; on Papin, D. 279, 283 unobservability of absolute motion, Parmenides 110, 123, 259 230; on entropy, 371, 395 Parry,J.39 Polaris 332 Particles, the concept of, 258-61; in the Positivism, 11-13, 103. See also Spencer, light of biological theory of knowledge, Comte, Mill, Mach, Empiriocriticism, 261-3; variability of their mass, 264-5; Mechanistic world view, Vienna Circle their materialization and demateriali• Possibilities, their absence in the determi- zation, 265-6; their event-like charac• nistic universe, 19, 111, 113. See also ter, 266-8; their relation to field, 274-5; Determinism, Freedom, Indeterminacy their role in thermodynamics, 382-3 Proto-mental entities, physical events as, Past, its direct perception denied by 302-311, 395 Strong and Meinong, 156-7; affirmed Pythagoreans, 51, 75, 182-3 by Bergson, 157; the problem of its integral preservation 152-163 Quantitative view of nature, its crisis, 310 Paul, Saint 104 Quantum of time, see Atomistic theory Paulsen, F. 102, 105 of time Peirce, Ch. S., similarity of his views to Quantum theory, 43, 266, 304-5, 311, Mach's biological theory of knowledge, 378-80, 383-4. Cf. also Planck, L. de 18; anticipates microphysical indeter• Broglie, Planck's constant, Action, In• minacy, 286-7, 290, 299, 310, 386; his determinacy principle, Spatiotemporal 'tychism', 290, 299, 356; on the relation continuity of microphysical indeterminacy to Quincey, T. de 219 causal efficacy of consciousness, 350--1 Quine, W. V. 61, 64, 77, 80 Pepper, S. C. 93, 97, 138 Perrin, J. 41, 268 Radioactive disintegration, and micro• Perry, R. B. 101, 105, 163, 222 physical indeterminacy, 292, 362, 382 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS 411

Rankine, W. 372, 396 67; his agreement with Poincare about Raphael, 103 mathematical continuity, 75, 80; his Rationality in general, different from its associationism. 90, 92-3, 123, 125-6, specific, historical forms, 3, 59, 74, 344; for direct perception of the past, 298-9, 364--5 124--5,341-2; against direct perception Ravaisson, F. 222 of the past, 160-1, 163, 344; incon• Reichenbach, H., XII; on Helmholtz, 28; sistent in his views about the status of on the zone of 'middle dimensions', 31, time, 148-9, 151; 335-9; rejects du• 39; his polemic against Dewey, 57; his rationless instants in psychology, 137, biological epistemology, 65-7, 71; on 140, 156, 340; on the immortality of Langevin's paradox of the twins, 246, the past, 153-4; his sympathy for Ele• 255; on the Heraclitean elements in atism, 148, 389; concedes the Heracli• modem physics, 275, 277; on inde• tean tendencies in modem physic, 275, terminism in physics and biology, 277; 299-301, inconsistent in his views 350-3, 366; on entropy, 372, 396 on microphysical indeterminacy, 299, Relational theory of time, two kinds of, 301; on limitations of mathematical 369-70 description of physical events, 54--7; Relativity theory, general, see Einstein, and on their non-pictorial character, Equivalence principle, Field, Gravita• 308; ridicules Bergson's views, IX, X, tion, Langevin's paradox of the twins, 142 147, 335, 345, 381; misrepresents Non-Euclidian space, Space-time cur• Bergson's views on the nature of num• vature ber, 81-3, 185; closest to Bergson in Relativity theory, special, eliminates in• 1915, 340-3; admits non-discrete tran• stantaneous space, 226, 237; reciprocity sitions, 339; his event-theory of matter, of appearances, 240-2; Bergson's in• 342-3; his view on Zeno's paradoxes sights, 238-244; 251; Bergson's incon• compared with that of Bergson, 336- sistencies, 244--51. See also Simultane• 340; his commitment to logical ato• ity, Space, instantaneous, Time-space mism, 340, 343-4; axiom offreemobility Renouvier, Ch. 115, 162; his finitism, 374, inapplicable to time, 203, 207; his in• 385, 392, 396-7 tellectual divorce from Whitehead, 306, Rescher, N. 77 335, 345; on Kant's first antinomy, Rey, A. 42, 45 388-9 Ribot, Th. 60, 63, 325, 330, 355, 366 Ryle, G. 365 Richet, Ch. 127 Riehl,A.28 Salzi, M. 298, 301 Riemann, B. 25, 391 Self, views of Descartes, 122; of Hume, Riemannian curvature, Riemannian 122; of Bergson, 212; of Russell, 344 space, see Non-Euclidian spaces, Space• Self-creativity of actual occasions, 100, time curvature 299 Rimbaud, A. 86 Sennert, D. 93 Robb, A. A. 233, 237 Scheele, K. W. 47 Robertson, H. P. 22, 28 Schelling, F. W. IX Roemer, Olaf XI, 233, 332 Schlick, M. 16,27-8,186,351,353-4,366 Rousseau, J. J. 87, 115 Scholastics 110 Royce, J. 124--5; on Bergson, 164--9 Schopenhauer,A.72 Russell, B., his complex relations to Schrodinger, E. 49, 262, 275, 277, 299 Bergson, XII, 335-45; his commit• Shakespeare, W. 103 ment to mechanistic view, to, 14, 393; Shaw, G. W. 393 against genetic approach in epistelogy, Shimony, A. 308, 311-12 412 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

Silberstein, L., on discrete space-time, Spinoza, B. 13, 19, 52, 104, I10-11, 221, 206-7 223-4, 384 Simultaneity, of distant events, its intui• Spinozism, positivistic alliance with, 13 tive character, 43; its connection with Spinozist (Spinozist-Laplacean) necessi- the notion of rigid, macroscopic body, tarian scheme, 59, 108-9 69-70,279; in classical physics, 227-9; Stallo, J. B. X, 41, 382 its denial in relativistic physics, 228-235. Stewart, B. 376, 390 See also Everywhere-Now, Juxtaposi• Stoics 104, 166,225, 370 tion, Instantaneous actions, Space, in• Stout, G. F. 127 stantaneous Strawson, P. F. 77; on the problem of Simultaneity of intervals, 248-251, 325-6. auditory world, 319-27, 329 See also Causal independence Stream of thought 95,139,145-6,158-63, Singer, Ch. 14 211, 216, 342 Smart, J. J. C. 313 Strong, C. A. 156-7, 163 Snell, W. 47 Succession, inseparable from duration, Socrates 79, 87, 89, 166 127, 220; its superfluity in rigorous de• Space, classical, see Euclidean space, terminism, 106-12; its relation to the Newtonian absolute space law of contradiction, 112-14. See also Space, its deification, 224-5 Novelty, Duration, Becoming Space, instantaneous, its negation, 226- Succession, perception of, see Transition, 236, 250-3, 331. See also Simultaneity, experience of Juxtaposition, Instantaneous actions Synechism, Peirce's term used by James Space-time, classical, 226-8 to characterize Bergsonism, 162 Space-time, curvature of, 25, 264, 270, 297, 378-80 Taine, H. 9, 11, 14, 92, 109-10, 112, Space-time, relativistic, see Time-space 122-3, 155, 163, 222, 330; his double Spatial distances, replaced by spatio• aspect theory, 93, 97, 138 temporal distances, 231-5, 271 Talt, P. G. 376, 390 Spatial intuition and number, Bergson's Tannery,J. 183, 186 analysis, 180-5. See also Russell Tannery, P. 75 Spatiality, different degrees of, see Ex• Technology, its influence on the develop• tension ment of sciences and vice versa, 46-8 Spatialization, fallacy of, 85, 183-5, 206, Teleology in biology, the problem of, 217,307, 391-2 353-6, 362-5 Spatio-temporal pulsations, 268, 304 Temporal signs, theory of, 123-4 Specious present, see Temporal span Temporal span, its different degrees and Spencer, H., his biological theory of its variability, 157-60, 199-202,214-19, knowledge, 4-21, 24, 27-8, 37-9, 46, 289-90, 294, 303, 306, 356-7, 360-2 50, 56, 67; criticized by James, 32, 39; Thibaudet, A. 14, 58, 62-4, 72, 190, 194 on energy, 12; his energetic interpre• Thirring, H. 246, 255 tation of causality, 17-18; his Lamarc• Thomas Aquinas 104, 153-4, 161 kism, 70; his double aspect theory, 93, Thomson, J. J. 45, 205 97, 138; his Unknowable, I10; his as• Thorndike, A. M. 268 sociationism, 123; on pathology of time Time, homogeneous, 173, 191-2, 202-5, perception, 219, 222; his cyclical theory 224, 305. See also Continuity, mathe• of the universe, 376, 391, 397; on multi• matical, Spatialization plication of effects, 349; Bergson's re• Time, see Duration, Becoming, Novelty, lations to his thought, XII, 4, 30f., I17; Succession his pantheism, 391 Time, proper, Bergson's insistence on its INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS 413

constancy, 242; its lengthening in the time, 131, 206-7 gravitational field, 246 Void, its distinction from 'the full' as the Time-retarding journey, see Langevin's very basis of classical atomism, 258, Paradox of the Twins 270, 309; merely relative, 262-4, 268; Time-space, relativistic, its features, 229- abolished by contemporary physics, 37; its affinity with Bergson's 'extensive 274-5. See also Fallacy of simple lo• becoming', 234-37, 254-55. See also cation Simultaneity, Space, Instantaneous, Extensive becoming Wahl, J. 236; on' the principle ofabsence', Tolstoi, L. N. 103 282-3 Tonquedec, J. de 392 Wald, F. 381 Transition, experience of, denied by Love• Ward. J. 167, 209, 319, 322 joy, 121-2, 144, and by C. A. Strong Wave-particle dualism, Bergson on; less and Meinong, 156-7; affirmed by paradoxical in auditory models, 326-7 Bergson, 119-20, 157, by James, 121-3, Weber, L. 290 145, by Royce, 124-5, by Russell, Weierstrass, K. 148 124-5, 341-2, by Koffka, 145 Weizsacker, C. F. von 105 Tychism 162, 356. See also Peirce Weyl, H. 225, 227, 236; agrees with Tyndall, J. 41, 45, 103, 273, 277 Bergson on mathematical continuum, 140-1, 311-12; on atoms as 'holes in Uexkull, J. von 36, 38-9 space', 391 Ullmo, J. 301 Whitehead, A. N. XI-XII, 10,47.50,130, Umwelt, see Uexkull 159,172,179,215,222; on 'becoming Undulatory character, of matter, 49, 198, of continuity', 97-8. 120; on self-cre• 267, 305, 307-8; of radiation, 196-7, ation of actual occasions, 100,299; on 267 genuine possibilities, 116-17; on Kant, Unity and multiplicity, of duration, 136,140; on immortality of past, 153-4, 147-51; Russell on, 97. Cf. also Brou• 161; treats becoming as a concrete wer universal, 174-5; on fallacy of simple 'Unseen Now' as an extrapolation of location, 191, 266, 276-8, 282; denies 'Seen Now' or 'Here-Now', 233-34 instants, 205, 230-1, 234, 236-7, 318, Uranus 34 326-7, 330; on Langevin's paradox, Ushenko, A., criticizes Bergson and in• 246-7; inconsistent about simultaneity, sists on discreteness of time, 118-20, 252-56; on organic view of nature, 314; 125, 129, 144, 171, 173, 316, 328. See his view of matter similar to that of also Lovejoy-Ushenko's objections Bergson, 216, 267-8, 303-9, 311, 331; his auditory metaphors; his relation to Velocity of light, significance of its finite Russell value, 231, 235-6 Whitrow, G. J. 104,207,350,378,396 Venn's diagrams, 74 Whittaker, T. E. 21, 28, 45, 207. 237, 287, Vibrations constituting matter, their 290, 376, 384, 397 imageless character, 267-8 Wiener, P., on different degrees of cau- Vibratory theory of matter, held by sality, 365, 367 Bergson and Whitehead, 304-7, 342 Williams, O. 329 Vienna Circle, 53, 67, 351-2 Williams, D. 77, 80 Vigier, J. P. 297 Wilson chamber, 9, 42 Visual line, the basis for the notions of Winterstein, H. 351, 366 Euclidian line and instantaneous dis• Wittgenstein, L. 21, 28, 45, 207, 237, 287, tance, 234; as an inadequate symbol of 290, 376, 384, 397 414 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

World-lines, their irreversibility, 232-33 Young, T. 47 World process, four-dimensional, 228-9 World-wide instant, Eddington's term for Zawirski, Z. 249, 256, 285, 290 instantaneous space, 230, 331. See also Zeller, E. 72 Everywhere-Now, Simultaneity Zeno's paradoxes, 122,228; Bergson on, Wood,A.345 203,336-7; L. de Broglie on Bergson's Wright, S. 366-67 treatment of, 295, 300; Russell on, 148, Wundt, W. 210 336-40 Wiirzburg school, 122,217. Cf. also Ach, Zero time, cf. Lemaitre, Finitism Kiilpe, Messer Ziehen, Th. 366 Zilsel, E. 351, 353-4, 357, 359, 366 SYNTHESE LIBRARY

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